The World To Me
by Laryna6
Summary: Luke and Asch are the targets of a rather strange arte and must deal with the consequences. You can't exactly say someone isn't responsible enough to raise a kid when they're responsible for saving the world, now can you? Genderbend crack fic with plot.
1. Crackfic premise

This was written for the anonymous Tales of the Abyss kink meme on lj, in which people posted anonymous comments to a post with prompts like this one:

Asch/Girl!Luke & some Guy voyeurism.

And other people would write anonymous responses. Sadly, the person on whose lj that meme was held has had that account deleted, so we shall all mourn the loss of some good porn… I did a fem!Luke fic for the above prompt, and then posted it to adultfanfictiondotnet and mentioned to someone that I really couldn't see Luke getting an abortion in a million years. Not given his own status as an unwanted child who decided he wanted to live despite that. So I started writing this and then people kept posting other fem!Luke prompts to the meme… You'll see three more bits I did for the meme later on in this, although sadly only one makes the M rating. I rarely do explicit unless Nemi's involved.

The fic is complete for a given value of complete, and hence I'm posting the whole darn thing to fanfictiondotnet. I might post a few others here, I don't know though. Tales kind of lends itself to n/c, and when you consider that the main character is seven and hence any pairings with him are technically child abuse no matter how mature he manages to act (I mean, even at his worse he's managing to act ten years older than he actually is) things get pretty… Yeah.

Somehow most of my crack ends up with plot. Fluff and pwp kind of bore me, since it's like, yeah, it's hot and/or cute…. Now what? But yes, this started out as a pwp/crackfic combo that kind of turned semi-serious since Luke was… Well, Luke at me.

-

"Obviously an alteration to the body like that could only be accomplished through the use of the seventh fonon. But the complexity would be far beyond the scope of most fonists today. One of Daath's secret Fonic Artes?"

Luke sat on the examining table, blushing and covering herself with the hospital gown.

"You're right, there is one that does this," Ion admitted. "I can't use many of the artes, but my predecessors did a lot of healing spells that no one else could. But I can't imagine why Sync would have used a fertility arte on Luke, especially the one for the wrong gender."

"A, a fertility arte?" Luke's face was almost as red as his hair.

"Yes, this one was meant to turn women who couldn't become pregnant due to age or disease into healthy young women. It lasts until a child is born, but when they are everything catches up to the body all at once, so it's not really something that's good for old people to use unless they're nobles who really want children or something."

"Can you remove it like you did the curse slot?"

Ion shook his head. "This one requires the fon master and another seventh fonist to cast because it's hyperresonance-based. It reshapes the body on a level a single fonist can't match. I can't think of anything that would undo it except a second-order hyperresonance, and... I would need three other seventh fonists, and I don't think I would live long enough to complete removing the arte."

"What's a second order hyperresonance?" Luke asked. "And I'd rather stay a girl than have you die trying to save me, Ion. At least this way no one can confuse me with Asch."

"A second-order hyperresonance is two hyperresonances. Asch! Of course!"

"No! No no no no no! Asch is not finding out about this!" Luke folded her arms over her breasts, trying to squash them flat.

"Luke, do you see these numbers? These are bad numbers," Jade explained as to a child. "The arte is interfering with the fonons making up the genetic memory that holds your body together. If they separate, not all the life bottles in the world would bring you back. It's a unique assassination technique, but it will work if we do not remove it within two more days."

"Hmm? It shouldn't be that bad, even if he is..." Ion took the papers from Jade. "Luke, what are your feelings on abortion?"

"A what?"

"You mean pregnancy would halt the damage?"

"Pregnancy?!"

"This arte was meant to be cast on a royal wedding night, or... the night they were planning to become pregnant. It's been two days, and, well... it's not supposed to be in stage 1 for so long. The stability level with the arte active normally is actually a lot higher than the mother's normal stability level, to ensure the child is carried to term."

"So we could artificially inseminate Luke and use that as a stopgap until Asch regains his mental stability and can cast a second-order hyperresonance?"

Luke was glad she didn't know what those first two big words meant together.

"Oh dear." Ion paled. "You said that they had also cast an arte on Asch. Was it the same arte?"

"Asch isn't female," Jade assured him.

"Lucky bastard," Luke muttered. "Yeah, they only cast one arte that I could see, and then they untied Asch and he just jumped at me. I managed to knock him out with my sword even though my balance and everything is all wrong. He was out of it."

"Oh dear. Sometimes, there are people that the Score states need to have children that refuse to. I thought it couldn't be that one because Van wants Asch to join him, and... The numbers looked a little low, but they're a little high if it's that arte." Ion looked it over again. "Oh, here's your fonic defense stat... It was Prophecy Child. Oh dear."

"The one that was used on Emperor Peony's great-grandparents?"

"Yes."

"...My. But why would Van Grants want them to have a child or die?

"What?!"

-

"Guy, please, don't do this!"

Luke... yet a girl. Luke... yet a girl... Guy shuddered. "Luke, you'll be dead in three hours if we don't do this. And Asch practically killed himself an hour ago trying to break loose. Look, I'll stay with you, okay? I'll hold your hand, and I won't let him be rough, and as soon as the arte takes effect I'll get you out of there and... I don't want you to die, Luke."

"I hate this, I..." Then Luke saw Asch.

Ion was right, Luke's high fonic defense stat was what had allowed her to resist the effects long enough to beat Asch off with a sword. Stripped of her gear, the arte was able to turn her into as crazed a sex fiend as Asch. She was out of Guy's arms as soon as Natalia opened the door.

Natalia couldn't look. Guy couldn't look AWAY. Luke was almost demure, in a come get me NOW, MISTER way that way that turned submission on its head. She appeared to be able to think clearly enough to unchain Asch, but there was only one thing going on in that mind.

Why was there foreplay? Guy would have thought they would, well, get to it, but they were kissing and oh damn that was hot. Asch pressed Luke against a wall and knelt down (and if Asch remembered that when he was in his right mind again he would go ballistic) and oh man. Guy told the hand that was on his hip to not creep any closer to where he wanted it, damn it!

It was... two Lukes, and muscles, and Luke's were smaller than Tear's but were better than her breasts because they were Luke's, and then Luke moaned, pulling Asch up with her fists in his hair as he surged up and finally entered her.

When had his hand ended up at the front of his pants?

"Ligers mate constantly until the female is pregnant and so do subjects of this arte. Since Luke's organs are so new that might take a few hours. Guy, take readings on their health every ten minutes and apply gels if necessary."

"Uh, sure Jade."

Before Guy could move his hand Jade pressed his down over Guy's and rubbed a bit, making Guy jump back and stare at Jade. "You're not going to be able to take readings if you're standing there drooling. Get it out of your system as necessary."

Did Jade just say what he thought he said?

When this was... over, Asch was going to kill Luke, and him for watching this, and then die of embarrassment.

Well, he might as well enjoy his last minutes (or maybe even hours) alive.


	2. You can't be serious

Okay… as for timeline, what timeline… You know, I think I should really just give up trying to figure out how this fits into the game. I mean, it's a gender bend AU.

Background: Van and Sync were at the Radiation Gate for the big confrontation that happened at the Absorption Gate in-game. They used the arte on Luke, and Asch who was there, while the other god-generals, who did not play possum and let everyone think they died at Mt. Roneal, kept the party busy.

By the time that was over, Asch had been knocked out and Luke, wearing very ill-fitting clothing and so on, was playing keep-away from Van due to the physical changes having played merry hell with her ability to _run_, let alone fight solo, and Sync had been pretty close to used up by the hyperresonance and hit over the edge into the core by Luke when he almost managed to grab her. Anise, the other party member who wasn't fighting the god-generals, had been forced to grab Ion and run because Van had made the mistake of telling Sync to grab Ion (he'd intended to kill Ion with the arte instead of Sync) where she could hear. Asch and Luke had decided to cover her retreat and keep Van busy while the others were occupied, which turned out to be a mistake.

The 'one month' post-battle lull in this was replaced by everyone going to Belkend and trying to figure out WTF was going on re Luke being female and Asch trying to tear apart anyone in his way (to Luke), since his reliance on official gear meant his fonic defense stats weren't high enough to resist the mental effects. It helped that they had the intelligence to keep Luke away from him.

Thus, they knew they had the Sword and Jewel. When the miasma rose, Ion was well out of Mohs' reach and thus is not dead. All this enabled Luke to use the Sword's power to absorb, the Jewel's power to magnify a hyperresonances effect in the process of spreading out the fonons, second-order hyperresonance, and the glyph that controlled the planet storm to shut down the planet storm and destroy the miasma in one stroke. They needed the 10,000 people as a power source, but the planet storm is the ultimate power source. They couldn't use the planet storm for it in that point of canon because they lacked the jewel, which they needed to destroy the glyph later on in canon and so Jade didn't have the two and two to put together and realize that was an option.

It wasn't until after that that they were able to break the arte on Luke, although putting 'her' gear back on allowed her to resist the mental effects and dressing her as Asch allowed her to pass for male (all of this had been kept as secret as possible since she was a replica already, and a celebrity due to worldsavage). Before the arte was broken, Asch was willing to take Luke's place in combat. Now that he's in his 'right' mind, however…

To set the rest of the stage: they've dealt with Mohs, done most of the sidequests (except Nebilim, of course), the god-generals are still alive, so's Ion, Eldrant hasn't risen.

And thus…

-

"Luke, don't be ridiculous. You and Asch _have the same genes_. Do you have any idea what inbreeding can do to children? Not to mention that you aren't naturally female! And then we need to go to all those hazardous places on top of that! It is almost certain that you will not be able to carry the child to term, even if you were they would most likely be severely deformed and almost certainly retarded! And you're seven going on eight! Do you actually believe that you can take care of a child?" Jade wanted to tear his hair out.

"They're the same as we are, Jade. They won't have any inbreeding problems that we don't." Luke was surprisingly calm, and not budging.

"The odds that it doesn't have double copies of at least one gene are… If they're female, they would have identical copies of the X chromosome at minimum!" Not that this was too much of a handicap: no worse than being male.

"And the odds of a human being born with Lorelei's fonon frequency are exactly zero." Luke's hand didn't leave her stomach. "They're healthy, Jade. They're alive."

"You only conceived a month ago. You can't possibly…"

"They're my isofon, Jade. I can sense them." That _smile_. That look of maternal contentment… if Jade hadn't triple-checked it himself and had Ion, Tear, and the doctors here each check it over he would have been sure they hadn't been able to shake off the mental effects. "And I'm only seven and I'm saving the world, aren't I? I can take care of my child."

"Asch's child as well, and you may think you want it but_ he_ doesn't."

"That doesn't matter. I checked."

"You're not a legal adult and under Kimlascan law your parents can disown you for this."

"I've been expecting them to since I found out I was a replica." Luke's smile was still dreamy. "I don't care what Asch wants. Asch didn't want me either. But I'm alive, and this child is alive. I want to live, and I want them to live. I want them to have what I didn't. I want… I didn't know what I was going to do afterwards. I can't be my father's heir, I'm not the rightful one. Even if I am his son, I'm the younger one. I… I've traveled to so many places, met so many people, but there weren't any that felt like home. At least… not that I could stay with. They're not my family. They're Asch's. It feels like a lie even though the memories are real. But this child… they're my family. They're real."

Jade opened his mouth and tried to muster the traditional arguments against underage pregnancy.

None of them really applied.

Not dedicated enough? Ha.

Not enough money? Luke had funded a _million-gald bridge_ between Sheridan and Belkend and owned a small interest in Din's shop as her patron! Jade had tried to teach him financial responsibility by forcing him to use personal money to buy those arte books, and then he found out Luke had saved up that much by handling the shopping and expenditures right under his nose! Not to mention that he was entitled to a share of the profits of Keterberg's newest attraction, had been granted the title and lands of Viscount by Kimlasca, Peony had already set aside a manor for him in Grand Chokmah nearby Guy's and the palace…

Not to mention that Luke was a seventh fonist, and since the Jewel of Lorelei had such healing powers there really weren't going to be any of the usual health side effects, and yet…

"Luke, you may want this child, but Asch doesn't."

"I know. He tried to use the link between isofons to kill them."

"What?!" Trying to convince Luke to end the pregnancy was one thing, but attempting to kill an infant against their mother's will? "That idiot! Doesn't he have any idea what…" No, Asch wouldn't know the kind of havoc a badly done abortion or miscarriage, even this early, could wreck on a woman's body. Since Luke's body was artificial on top of that and the seventh fonon would have rallied to the child's defense… Luke's death was not out of the question. A _hyperresonance destroying Belkend_ wasn't either.

"That's why he's in that coma." Jade had never, he realized, seen Luke truly angry, but it was there, just a glimmer behind that pasted-on smile. "I'm not letting him wake up until he promises to leave them alone, and if he tries anything after that I will kill him if it's the last thing I do."

"I wouldn't argue with you there. But Luke, do you really want your child to be hated by their father like that?"

"Master Van… is the closest person I have to a father. He made me and pretended he loved me so that he could use me to destroy Akzeriuth and spare Asch. It hurts, but I don't think Asch will lie to them like that. It's a lot easier to deal with honest hatred than betrayal." Luke hugged herself, and the child, eyes closed in mourning, contemplation, or both. "He doesn't want them in his head, but then he doesn't want me in his head, and he was the one who arranged for me to get my fon slots synced to him at Choral Castle. It took awhile for the complaints they made to make sense. All my life, it's been about Asch. Asch's replacement, Asch's puppet when he tried to control my body and make me attack you, Asch's scapegoat… I don't care anymore what Asch wants. He can go fuck himself, because he's not going to get to fuck me over anymore and he's not going to lay a hand or a fonon on my baby. This is my body and my life, _not_ his."

Jade put a hand to his forehead. Faking adjusting his glasses wasn't going to cut it. "Luke, we're effectively in a war. That is no place for a pregnant woman. They're going to aim for your stomach and we won't be able to spare the life bottles, the spell that keeps fonic artes from affecting group members only covers four lives and your child would count as one, meaning only three combatants, your reflexes are all wrong for your changed body…"

"Remember when I had a hard time killing?"

Jade had planned to put Luke and Ion in the center of the party, keep them out of the battles. The battlefield was no place for sheltered Fon Masters and nobles, young (replica) children, _especially ones that needed to be kept alive for the mission to succeed_.

"I really shouldn't be fighting anyway," Luke told him. "I'm the only one with hyperresonance." Asch didn't travel with them by choice, couldn't be counted on and hence didn't count. "I realized that ages ago, but I didn't want to be a burden."

"You wouldn't be a burden any more than Ion is." Jade sighed. "You're right, and I should have realized how foolish it was to risk you in combat ages ago." If Luke died the world was _doomed_, and they'd let him go up against god generals? What had he been thinking?! Jade chalked it up to the Luke Effect again, the same one that had kept him from realizing just how dangerous Akzeriuth's destroyer was and doing something about it. Luke was a good person, Luke wanted to help protect, Luke was competent… and he didn't see beyond those truths into the shadows. "But we don't have any idea why they wanted you to have this child, Luke."

"We did nearly die, when they came into being. I think it was an assassination arte all along. We're isofons, and another midway between us, half replica and half original… we would have blended together and been absorbed into Lorelei, I think."

"Why didn't you?" Just killing someone didn't always work, not if there were life bottles and seventh fonists nearby. Making _Luke and Asch_, the isofons of the consciousness that healed and revived, die_ and_ _stay dead _while the rest of them were present would be difficult enough to justify something that elaborate.

"Asch started to, but I didn't want Asch taking over my baby's body, so I kept him out. That was when I understood how the whole talking thing worked. If my baby had died but we hadn't then that arte would have just made us try again until one of us died and then all of us would have." My baby. Not our baby, Jade noted. "I didn't try to drown them at all, because they're so precious. I know how Lorelei feels now when he calls us his precious isofons. If I were them I couldn't look at them, and hold them, and take care of them." There was that 'pregnant woman' look again.

"You do realize that this means you're going to have to remain female for another seven months."

"Maybe more. Breast feeding is very good for them."

"Gah…gg… What?" And Jade had thought he'd never had the ability to be shocked like that.

"I don't know if I'll switch back, actually. The arte isn't on me at more at all. I did this myself when it broke, so that my baby wouldn't die. But this is kind of fun, and I don't see why Asch is complaining. I mean, you would have to be really stupid to mistake me for him now." Luke grinned. "Well, Guy has problems with women, but I think I'm helping him. He can touch me because I'm me, and I think that's making it easier for him to handle getting glomped by Anise and so on. Guy really wants a family, since he lost his. If I can help cure that phobia so he can have one as well as me, I think that would be worth staying in this body for awhile longer."

"You don't…" Jade waved at Luke's body: the breasts, the lack of external genetalia…

"Yeah, it was weirding out the others too and Asch doesn't feel this way. I think it might be because I'm Lorelei's isofon and all seventh fonon. Asch is still an original, but I'm… You know how Ion is. I don't think a lot of replicas think it's such a big deal, and Lorelei _really_ isn't inherently male, any more than fire is. If the seventh fonon were male then all replicas would be, so that's obviously not the way it works. And all originals would be hermaphrodites, which is scary. I mean… staying in this body is better for my baby, it helps Guy, it makes me less like Asch," and Luke now had even less tolerance for the baby-murdering bastard, "and I like new experiences. Maybe it's because I was trapped in the manor for so long."

"Well… it is the mother's decision, and you've countered all my arguments." Saying that it felt wrong was so very unJade. "Moving on, are you really going to have to keep Asch in that coma? We don't really have anywhere safe enough to put him, and I don't want to haul him around with us."

"Oh, like anyone's safe with him running around loose." Luke snorted with derision. "At least this way we can get our hands on him if we need him. I'll know if he's attacked and I'll let him wake up. Or puppet his body to kill the attacker the way he tried to puppet mine." Making Luke attack one of his friends? Luke had been willing to forgive and forget before, more than he really should have in fact (Luke was like that), but Asch had been placed in the same 'it would be nice if they weren't bastards but they are, so I'm just going to have to deal' category as Van, it seemed.

Jade threw up his arms in surrender. "Well, you've already amassed a collection of parenting books and so on. You're healthier than you were before this happened, you should actually be safer now that you're not going to be fighting, it's not like you don't have the resources to take care of them… It seems utterly ridiculous, the entire concept of you having a child, but you're far more qualified than the majority of the people they allow to spawn. I'll brush up on gynecology…"

"Tear's already been trained in that. She is a powerful seventh fonist, after all." Even in the Oracle Knights they had to be prepared for circumstances.

"And you've already had this conversation with her, haven't you."

"And Guy. You're taking it a lot better than they did. Guy started talking about how he'd raised me and twenty-two was way too young to be a step-grandfather. I said he could be the step-father if he wanted and he actually fainted."

"I can't imagine why." Jade gave thanks to Lorelei that neither Luke nor Asch had been aware of their surroundings during the conception process.

"Guy's going to be a really great father. I mean, he was the one who raised me." Although really he'd been more of a mother, but Luke was going to be her baby's mommy and that was that.

"Do you have a name picked out?"

"Yes."

"What is it?"

"I'm going to tell them first. It's their name, after all."

"You keep using 'they,' and yet you say 'my baby' singular. Don't you know the gender?"

Luke only smiled, and Jade decided he shouldn't have gone there. "I haven't decided yet."

Too much information. "Um, well. If you're up to things on that level now then I suppose I'm not needed." Luke was an incarnation of the sentience that governed things like healing and the memories that told the body what it should be, and so on. Jade attempting to counsel her was on the order of someone who had heard a few old wives' tales trying to counsel _him_.

"I can take care of my baby, but it's nice that you care."

Jade decided he was going to get drunk. When he returned to the men's room of the suite (Jade, Guy, and comatose Asch: Ion wasn't back yet) with the bottles that had been left in the main area Guy held up his arm silently asking for one, or all of them. "Hand them over, I know how to mix drinks, remember."

"What do you think of all this?"

"I think it might be the best thing that ever happened to Luke, actually, and that's really depressing."

Jade considered that for a moment. "Other than you deciding to care for Luke, I can't argue with you."

"But I thought she was Asch-Luke, and I wanted to kill him. Her. Whatever. It started out as a lie. This is something real. I mean, she met all of us under false pretenses of whatever sort. Everything in her life is really tainted by Asch and Van. Yeah, I get that this happened because Van set Asch up to rape her, but it's different somehow. And not all that different from how she came about."

"A second chance. A chance to give her child what she never had." Jade took the glass from Guy gratefully and downed it too fast to really taste it. "But I don't think she loves them just for that. No, that would be like you loving her for Asch. If she saw the child as herself she would have merged with it."

"Lorelei could absorb her and Asch, she said." Guy sipped at his own glass, testing it. "But they're his, its, whatever, precious isofons. That whole family tree gets really weird. The Score brought about Asch, who inherited Lorelei's power. Luke was created from the power of Lorelei that was in Asch, and is therefore his… daughter, sister, and mother due to the whole aspect of fonon sentiences thing."

"Maiden, mother, crone."

"Yeah, you are kind of right. Lorelei is old, Luke really isn't a child anymore, she really isn't. Children are supposed to have someone to look after them. Adults want someone to look after. Luke has that and no one is going to mess with them." Guy finished the next drinks. "That is going to be one pampered kid. Luke found out from Asch when he was going to meet up with Noir and brought me with her to place some toy orders, and_ man_. And the cradle, and clothes, and so on."

"Is it a wise idea to spoil someone with the power that child will possess?"

Guy gave him a look. "Luke was spoiled, and she hated it. She loves Van mostly because he actually gave her some direction and discipline. Kids need that, she knows it."

"Remarkably mature for her age." Bottoms up.

"Yeah, but what age?" Guy did the same this time, and started mixing right away. "She's seven, seventeen, and Lorelei only knows how many thousand. That look in her eye…"

"Many pregnant women get that."

"They do?"

"Yes."

"That's a relief." Guy toasted the air with the next mix. Jade took his glass himself. "She's still Luke, but… No, I am not saying my little girl's all grown up. That's _creepy_."

"She told me she's picked out a name but not a gender." Around then was when they stopped counting.

"Yeah, she's not sure which is better." Weirded-outness loved company. "So she's being given a crash course by Tear on all things feminine. She even borrowed Tear's maid outfit."

"You poor man." Guy could look, but he couldn't touch.

"And Natalia! She was going to marry Luke, and then she found out that her childhood sweetheart was really Asch, and now Luke is having Asch's kid. You buried yourself in your books, she's wandering around in a daze except when there's stuff that needs doing… I mean, yeah, they essentially both got raped. She knows it's not their fault, but it's not like she can put it behind her when Luke's being all… glowy. You know how Natalia is about looking after people: _she_ wanted that baby. And then Asch trying to kill the poor thing and getting beaten into a coma like Luke was after Akzeriuth? He's her Luke, but the Luke she made that promise with wouldn't have done something like that and I really, really wish I could catch her on the rebound."

"You think it's her relationship with Asch that will break, not Luke?"

"I would bet money. Luke is… Luke. Asch, though? He's been nicer to her than the rest of us, but she was there when he was yelling at Luke and finally tried to kill the baby. She's going to come out of denial about the fact he's not her Luke anymore, and at that point he's Asch the Bloody, God-general, abandoner of his country, cousin-abuser, and attempted baby-killer. Yeah, he's as good as dumped. She's going to miss him a lot, but I don't know how many of those arrows are going to hit."

"Hell hath no fury like a woman…"

"He's kind of both scorning her by leaving her to Luke for all that time and not by wanting to kill the baby… They were yelling at each other and I was trying to help Luke calm down before she blew up the building but if he said it was for her sake Natalia's going to try to kill him." Guy nodded sagely, and then blinked at the empty gin bottle. "Why am I still conscious? I'm even speaking in complete sentences."

"Is this the first time you've tried to get drunk?"

"Yeah, but they told me about it during the bartending thing."

"The higher your fonic and physical defense stats the more it takes." Guy took off his bracelet and resist ring, then started taking off his outer clothes to get at the armor underneath. "Good idea. I only brought enough for me to get drunk."

There was a knock on the door. "Jade? Did you take the drinks the governor sent as gifts to Luke."

"Contraindicated for pregnant people, and Anise, Tear, and Ion are underage. Why? Did you want some?" Jade opened the door in his base tunic. He was still dressed perfectly decently: armor chafed if there wasn't cloth between it and the skin.

"Apparently there's only enough for one person of my defense stats to get drunk… Oh, that's a good idea." Natalia removed her gloves.

Guy passed her a glass. "Here, we started before you. Jade, is there enough?"

"Natalia's a seventh fonist, I'm afraid. Tipsy is all we can hope for."

"That's a pity. I've never been drunk before." Natalia drank from the shot glass with decorum. "It hasn't been that long since my eighteenth birthday, and we've been rather busy."

"Is it safe for us to get drunk?" Guy asked. "I mean, only Tear is with Luke."

Jade waved off his objections. "It's nothing a panacea bottle won't cure. And in vino veritas. It intensifies emotions and damages the ability to think before speaking. I think we all could stand to be a little more honest with ourselves."

A while later they looked at the last three bottles, with no more than a half-inch between them. "I'll send a page for more," Natalia decided, and no one objected.

-

Anise hurriedly covered Ion's eyes, and hoped that Guy wouldn't have a heart attack when he realized what was going on. "Why are you two in the hallway?"

"Because if Asch thinks he'll ever see this much of my skin he's got another think coming!" Natalia proclaimed, quite happily.

"Uh, right." Anise rolled her eyes.

"See, Guy? Nothing scary so far."

"I think it's being grabbed that's the problem." Groping, however, didn't seem to be a problem. "Thanks, Natalia, I think this is really helping."


	3. You're kidding me

_Hmm… This thing was worked on off and on, scenes at a time, for quite awhile. I usually read through it while I was adding a new bit, but I'm pretty sure while there are no outright fic continuity errors there are a couple things that could use tweaking. Sadly, I kind of want to get this thing posted & off my plate, since I have other things to work on, like the DMC fic that hasn't been touched in forever. _

-

"Guy and Natalia have officially lost it," Anise announced when she and Ion made it into the cutesy room.

"At least Jade stopped singing."

"Thank Lorelei!" Tear proclaimed. "And I thought there was nothing he couldn't do. Why did he have to prove me wrong like that? Why? I have perfect pitch!"

"Drunk?" Anise asked.

"Drunk." Luke confirmed it with a nod. "Are they still trying to lose their virginity while they supposedly have the excuse of being drunk?"

"Oh, so that's what that was about. Nope, but Natalia's totally naked if that's any help."

"Yeah, that's progress." Luke yawned. "I can't decide if I want them to or not. I mean, obviously yes, eventually, but right now?"

"Is Asch still yelling about it?"

"Don't worry, Tear, I'm not getting headaches anymore, but it's gotten easier to block him out since I went over and banged on the door." Thus causing Guy and Natalia to take it somewhere else. "Personally, I would have just tossed some blankets and pillows over him, he can't tell what's going on around him very well." Yawning again, Luke rolled over. "Lock the door. Natalia's sleeping in the men's room tonight, one way or another. You can have her bed, Ion." Now that Ion was back safe from shopping with Anise (as opposed to kidnapped by someone), Luke was going to sleep. She hummed to herself a bit to a tune of 'sleeping for two, sleeping for two…"

"_God damn it, let me go!"_

"_What, you don't think I'd rather be there instead of Natalia? Of all the people to lose my virginity to, it had to be _you._" _Luke's mental voice was disgusted. _"I'm just glad cousin Natalia's not going to waste her time waiting for you anymore. You had seventeen years, Asch. She was there, you were fucking around with Van. I'll ask you again if you'll promise to leave my baby alone in the morning. Or whenever they finish." _

"_That…" _

"_Don't you dare call my baby 'that thing!' If you say anything like that to them, ever, I will _castrate_ you." _The threat had a definite impact on him, she noted. She'd gotten the idea from how the others acted about gender. _"How dare you try to pin the blame on an innocent baby instead of you and Van! How dare you! It was one thing when it was just me, but no one will treat my baby like that, _no one_! Do you hear me?!" _

Silence.

"_Do you hear me? Because I will go over there, and I won't give you an eyeful on the way because Natalia's not stupid enough to consider you worthy anymore, and I will melt your balls off with hyperresonance, and _nothing _will heal injuries that makes. So, do you hear me?!" _

"_I hear you." _He seemed stunned.

"_Good." _Luke seethed, and made sure he knew how angry she was. _"I thought I deserved how you treated me, but that's because Akzeriuth made me hate myself. But when I see you treat someone else that way, then I can be objective, then I can see that no one deserves what you've done to me, what Van has done. I'm not taking it anymore. And my baby will never have to take any of it or I will tear apart whoever is responsible!" _

"…_you really do love it." _

"_More than anything." _Precious little happy light, singing with the voice they all shared (even Asch), safe and warm and well taken care of. _"I realized that I wanted to live for myself, but now I have two people I love to live for. And Guy, Tear, Ion, Natalia, even Jade and Anise. They care about me. I compare the way they treat me to the way he did, and now I can tell the difference. I didn't have real love to compare his lies to before. But I love my baby, and compared to that, the way he treated me? I have to thank him for my existence, and my baby's, but I'm going to live, and that means killing him. I don't feel guilty for that anymore. I don't feel guilty for 'taking your life.' Because I know what a life is now. I know what's important now, I know what I need to do." _

"…_you've changed."_

"_And you're only now catching on?" _Asch's attempt to examine the thing to see what was so special about a weird, arte-created, replica bunch of cells that was _not_ his child was met with a wall of will and a vicious snarl that sent Asch careening back, fonons resonating with pain. _"Mine. You will not touch her!" _Her, Luke realized, and smiled. Yes: her baby wouldn't be like Asch.

"_It's… she's mine too."_

"_No. You lost all right to her when you tried to murder her. Now go to sleep!_" Van could force Lorelei to sleep: it was child's play to use a technique that worked on their ultimate original on Asch, who was more human than not and very, very weak next to Luke's true power, let alone the second order hyperresonance she could create for her child's sake.

-

"Well, the circumstances are… odd, but I have a grandchild."

Seeing that look, Guy knew that Lady Suzanne was going to be a help with the child but utterly no help at all at getting Luke to get rid of her. He'd given up on trying to get Luke to, really, but there was a look in Suzanne's eyes that was sort of similar the look in Luke's but in a less… "I have now won at life, and have the best prize ever," manner and more of a, "I have won at life so much that my _prizes_ have won prizes."

He supposed that under the circumstances…

Luke was a replica, Luke was seven, Luke had destroyed Akzeriuth, the original was wandering around, the original was antisocial, Luke lowering the land, Luke getting rid of the miasma, Luke being a manifestation of Lorelei, Luke having been turned into a girl, Luke being pregnant, with Asch of all people, and so on and so forth. Lady Suzanne appeared to have thrown away her weirdness meter and only started counting her blessings.

"I really couldn't see Luke ending the life of a child, not after what she went through," Suzanne explained, since Guy seemed to need it. "When you were going to undo the arte I was so worried that he would blame himself for failing to save them when they were killed as he was turned male again. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that Luke pulled off yet another miracle to save someone." Suzanne smiled a bit wistfully. "And I suppose that since I had to work so hard to be able to have a child, with my illness, it's not all that far a jump. I really wanted Luke, enough to risk my life."

Guy actually hadn't thought about that. But then, they both had a responsibility to continue their family lines, and while his phobia might be a big problem it probably wasn't going to kill him to have a kid. Unless he had a heart attack, but they were making progress even if he still hadn't lost his virginity.

Technically.

Not that he was going to be discussing this with Natalia's aunt. Oh, and Luke's mother.

"Please, look after her? I've always been so worried that my baby is going to all those dangerous places and having to fight…" They both knew, far more than the others, what Van had meant to Luke. "I know she can look after herself, but there's my granddaughter to think of as well. I know you're not a manservant anymore, but please, look after her."

"I'm technically her liegeman. Sort of." That got complicated. "And don't worry. Jade knows the theory stuff, and Tear's a licensed midwife, and Natalia's been reading those baby books you gave us as well as Luke."

"Is she getting proper nutrition?"

"Lots of fish, red meat, fruit, and salads." And that pizza concoction, but cheese had calcium and it wasn't like they had to worry about gaining weight with all the walking they did. More like they had to worry about having too little fat.

Apparently while men had most of their fat on the outside of their bodies women had it all through the muscles for easy access and padding and so on. And muscle weighted more than fat, so as Natalia walked around more and more her total weight had gone up, her figure had slimmed down only slightly because the hidden fat had been replaced by muscle, and eventually it had gotten to the point where _her breasts had started to get smaller_ because her body needed fat to burn and there wasn't any left anywhere else.

An indolent noblewoman could need to eat only 1,600 calories a day to stay the same weight. An healthy teenager like Princess Natalia had been (between archery practice and the muscle it created) needed 2,400. An active teenager like Princess Natalia who spent almost all day every day walking or fighting and had that much muscle hidden in that lean body could burn up to _4,000_ in a single rough day. Since she'd been eating a maintenance diet without realizing she needed to eat more now she had been losing _four pounds of fat a week_ for awhile into their journey, she'd been lean in the first place, and if it hadn't been for the joint aches from the lack of padding and the decreasing breast size they might not have caught it before she started technically starving to death. Her body fat percentage had been at seven percent and women were _not _supposed to go below twelve, and sixteen was about as low as it should be allowed. If she hadn't been a seventh fonist she would have been in serious trouble.

Tear and Anise, trained soldiers, had made the mistake of thinking she already knew that rising weight could mean the opposite of getting fatter, forgetting that noblewomen usually just thought that high numbers were bad and therefore starved their body into replacing all those energy-guzzling muscle cells with fat cells, so their clothing sizes went up and they got fatter… but the number on the scale went down.

Luke had started out with a male's, and a very active male's, percentage of body fat. They had a lot of other stuff to worry about, but that wasn't good.

"Please make sure she eats enough. Especially if she's planning to breast feed. Does she have morning sickness?"

"She shouldn't get it. Uh, shouldn't you talk to her about this?"

"Oh, you know Luke. She always pretends that everything's fine so she won't be a burden, and, well, it's too soon to feel those little feet kicking," how disappointing, "but I have a grandchild."

-

"Really? She's really going to be about my size?" Mieu poked Luke's stomach. It was hard to believe.

"Yes." Luke pet both of them.

"That's really neat! I wish it didn't take so long for humans to have cubs. I suppose I can stay longer… but I'd have to return the Sorcerer's Ring. Mieeeu." Mieu's ears perked down.

"We'll see." Luke thought she could bargain with the cheagle elder about that. After all, the ring had originally come from Yulia and Lorelei. Maybe there was some way to make another one.

Luke hadn't had a stuffed animal, but apparently they were very good for children, and one that could help them learn to talk, come get Luke if anything was wrong, and breathe fire at anyone who even thought about touching Luke's baby would be even better.

"Have you decided what you're making yet?" Human food was also weird and fascinating to the very-young Mieu, who, being a cheagle, ate grass.

"I already decided. It's supposed to be pie, but we don't have a recipe so I made pizza dough and I'm putting stuff in it." Mostly fruit. Mostly. "I don't know if it's going to be any good, but I do the shopping so if they want to complain about me wasting supplies then they… no, they can't start doing it themselves."

Guy had grown up a nobleman and all his shopping experience was on behalf of House Fabre. He'd trained himself to waste as much of his enemy's money as humanly possible and had all the wrong habits. Natalia was a princess, Jade had been in the military (which provided food, clothing, and weaponry) for far too long and only spent his personal money on luxuries, Tear had grown up in Yulia City, and Anise had sworn not to embezzle but Luke was well aware that old habits died hard.

"It's sort of like my 'toss anything that looks good in there and call it a salad' invention, but hopefully more portable." They had to eat while walking a lot, and managing a big bowl was awkward. "And according to Anise, the cooked equivalent of 'toss all the leftovers in and actually have it come out pretty good' is pie." Anise had grown up poor and knew these things.

"Like when you took Tataroo grass, and Rugnica grass, and grass from Cheagle Woods, and grass from outside Baticul, and…"

"Yes." They had to bring grass with them for Mieu, and when they'd started to get a little low Luke had just tossed everything in one bundle.

"That was really neat!" Mieu bounced up and down. "I know your pie will be really good too!"

"I think so. I've gotten pretty good at cooking, what those guys say to the contrary." They'd started complimenting his cooking once, and then they'd started getting little digs in until he thought it wasn't actually any good at all. It turned out Jade had started it to motivate Luke to improve even more, leaving Natalia as the only bad cook of the group. "Jade told me he's planning on making his special curry tonight. If they have any survival instinct, they'll want my pie instead of risking being his guinea rappigs. If they have any sense, they'll make their own food." _Luke's_ pie. She had a kitchen knife and a Soul Crush and wasn't afraid to use them.

"Special?" Mieeeeeeu…

"Thing, if Jade tries to eat you come get me and I'll kick his ass for you."

"Really?" Luke hadn't called him Thing in far too long: Mieu was starting to worry that Master didn't like him anymore, but luckily Mieu still had a name from her.

"Really. He made a comment about testing his stuff on me while I'm pregnant, and I should probably beat him up just to discourage the idea."

-

"Wow. I mean, I knew something was up from the way Jade sent his reports," they had been trying to keep this covered up. "And then I got that letter, but man. You're a woman. A very, very hot woman, I might add. Too bad you're already taken."

"I am not taken."

"Well, if you're having his baby…"

"This is not Asch's baby. She is _my baby_." Even Peony knew to back away a bit from a glare like that, although the self-defense his hands were raised in was mostly joking.

"Whoa, whoa, who said anything about Asch?" Peony looked at Jade. "You mean?" He pointed from Luke, Guy, back to Luke, and shook his head questioningly.

"No, she's not Guy's." Damn it.

"Okay then. I guess I know who the godfather is going to be. The letter didn't actually say you were," Peony assured Guy, "but I kind of assumed from how you were acting. Sorry about that."

"Uh, no problem?" Guy scratched the back of his head, smiling but clearly embarrassed.

"So…" Peony turned back to Luke. "Not taken?"

"Not interested."

"Fair enough. I'll just have to see if I can change your mind about that. How are you doing for clothing?"

"No one sells durable enough maternity wear. And I need to be able to move in that."

"Sure, I can help with that. Just let me have your measurements," although he could make an educated guess, "and I'll have the royal seamstresses get right on it."

Luke shrugged. "Five foot seven, hundred fifty pounds."

Peony's maids were bodyguards, and very attractive bodyguards, that often had to remain on duty for the first three months, and Peony was very good at judging the female body. That height, weight, and figure meant Luke was way, way too thin. "Damn it, Jade, what are you feeding this girl?"

"She started out with a male body, remember." Jade sighed.

"I know, I know, I'm eating as much as I can."

"Yeah… problem is that if you're pregnant _and_ running around the place all day _and_ casting artes_ and _you need to build up reserves that's not going to be enough unless you either stuff yourself until you feel sick or stick to stuff that has a lot of calories. Are you eating fruits and vegetables?"

"Of course."

"Don't. Look, talk to Magnolia while the tailors are getting your measurements, okay?" Peony leaned back in his throne. "And I'll have someone get you some of those little square ration things. They taste terrible, but they're got a lot of energy and don't take up a lot of room in your stomach." They actually hadn't made them in years, not since Peony had been fed one by Jade and subsequently had the army's food supply system entirely redesigned, but they kept for decades and she didn't have to know that.

It wasn't like it could possibly make them taste any worse.

They left Grand Chokmah with twenty outfits designed for increasing tummy and breast size, a whole lot of really awful thousand calorie each squares, and a maid. Selenia was a sweet little forty-one-year old brunette who looked thirty and had served Peony's older sister before her untimely (or timely, due to the Score) death. She was skilled in etiquette, fashion, grooming, women's health, detecting poisons and booby traps, and a weaponless (except for specially reinforced gloves) combat style called Terearadelaca, which was Ancient Ispanian for either 'that which faces fear' or 'that which inspires fear,' due to a bit of probably deliberate confusion on the subject of the verb delaca, to oppose, which was in fact a close relative of the verb delca, to seize, as Luke had guessed.

Guy had had no idea that the weakest of the women he'd been admiring when they visited Peony had been level twenty. Selenia herself was thirty-six, the strongest Peony could spare given the current world situation and the fact that it was possible Van could decide to start trying to assassinate the world leaders instead of wanting them to have to watch this helplessly at any moment.

Jade, who was used to Peony's girls, wasn't surprised when Selenia made herself invisible. Luke had certain reactions to people trying to tell him or her what to do. It was understandable, given that he'd grown up surrounded by two groups: people who didn't know the first thing about what kind of person he really was, and Master Van, who knew so much more than Luke did. She had gradually adjusted to the idea that people could be right sometimes even if they weren't always, but while Akzeriuth's ensuing self-hatred had lowered Luke's self-esteem to the point where the 'people who know better than me' category had been pretty big, she had luckily acquired a bit more of the selfishness Tear had talked about one time.

Or perhaps it wasn't selfishness, not quite.

Still, bratty Luke had possessed a tendency to, in retrospect, challenge anyone who attempted to give him advice or 'tell him what to do' to prove to him that they actually knew what they were doing and that he should listen to them. Tear had backed down and Jade had dismissed him as a brat, which had sent all the wrong signals.

Their misreading of the situation had caused Luke to dismiss them as people like the ones at home: all talk, no real idea what they were talking about or willingness to back it up, and them to regard him as someone who resented authority instead of respecting it enough to only give it to people who had shown they were worth listening to.

They'd given him good advice, but they'd acted like the type of people who _always_ gave Luke bad advice. He'd generally been forced to apply it in practice, but it had set his teeth on edge because he 'knew' what they were telling him couldn't be correct. Not to mention that their attempts to help him after backing down and showing they weren't good advisors set off Luke's 'incompetent idiots who won't stop trying to order me to do useless and counterproductive things' radar.

What a headache.

If Selenia had offered advice it would have led to one of Luke's 'prove to me you know what you're talking about' challenges and unlike Guy, who was a good friend but a horrible manservant, a maid couldn't establish herself as worthy of dominance even over a limited area. If she'd backed down Luke would have thought she wasn't good enough and flown her right back to Grand Chokmah. However, by remaining in the background unless Luke came to her for advice instead of volunteering it or certain services Luke didn't know to ask for Selenia kept her status as 'useful tool.' Only unlike Mieu Selenia wouldn't fit in the item bag and was generally left on board the Albiore, since while Noelle could deal with most threats by taking off she had to sleep _sometime_ and if an enemy managed to board she was in trouble, as was Asch's body.

Guy, who had been raised a noble, couldn't really manage that unobtrusiveness, which had led to that strange byplay between them early on where Guy was at some points regarded as absolutely right and at others as absolutely wrong.

While Luke had improved in that area, the switch in other areas was far more dramatic. "Okay, now where were we?" Before the arte had been removed, group notified, parents notified, and shopping accomplished.

Actually, no one had been quite sure. After the frantic pace there had been for awhile things had dried up when Luke got rid of the planet storm and Absorption Gate, which was why they had taken a break to work on making sure it was safe to remove the arte.

"Okay." Luke frowned. "Sync's probably still trying to get replica data, but we've warned everyone about him so if he shows up someplace they'll know even if they might not be able to stop it without a riot… I guess we're stuck flying around and looking for leads. We were just in Belkend, Baticul, and we're in Grand Chokmah, so… Sheridan, Chesedonia, Daath, or Yulia City?"

"All else being equal, I'd kind of like to visit Sheridan again," Guy volunteered.

"Anyone else?" Luke's question was met with shrugs and silence. "Okay, Sheridan it is then." She had a cut of the toll money to collect. Normally she would have turned it down or shared it with the group, but it wouldn't hurt to have an emergency fund, right? Because, seriously, if Jade tried to make her get money from her mother to buy stuff that was in fact for everyone's benefit again when Luke was the reason the party had that money… Her mother would jump at it, but Luke wanted this over with before she got too much further along and people who tried to make her do irritating side trips for stupid reasons would get skewered.

When they were heading to Yulia City Guy spotted something strange. "Hey, since when is there an island with a city on it here?"

"I think it's moving," Tear announced, amazed, after joining Guy at the window.

"I think we have our lead." Splendid!


	4. You wouldn't dare

_This is probably the chapter where the differences in Luke's character evolution become really apparent. What's easy to overlook is how damn smart Luke is, and how fast he/she is able to learn/adapt. To be fair, the game's characters, other than Guy in a single optional scene, don't get it either. A lot of the 'unhealthy' character traits they're trying to beat out of Luke are perfectly healthy traits in a seven year old, which makes me headdesk. _

_Luke is outright trying to get heroically killed to make up for Akzeriuth for the majority of the game, and having never been recognized has a hard time seeing value in himself, especially due to the age screw-up making a lot of the advice he gets utterly wrong. Children require acknowledgement to transition to thinking like an adult. Luke does not get that necessary acknowledgement until a few seconds before he dies (Lorelei). Whether or not Luke can get clinical depression (neural age or physical?) is up in the air, but no, he can't develop self-worth without other people saying that he has worth. _

_  
On the other hand, Luke will forgive in an instant things people never forgive him for. This child allows Luke to see the wrongness and hypocrisy of how she was treated since when it comes to the child she can be objective the way Luke was about Ion's death, which Anise was far more responsible for than Luke was for Akzeriuth. _

_The child's existence becomes Luke's validation, in essence. Once she has that validation, she stops being so needy because she's gotten what she needs. And stuff that game!Luke needs to be in denial about to avoid going outright insane she can face, and that mind gets put to actually examining people's flaws… _

_Guy, Natalia, Tear, and so on are no longer the best candidates for the parental figures a seven-year-old needs and Luke is no longer trying to please them in order to validate strategies. Judged by his true age, Luke's a prodigy. As a seventeen year old… He's a wonderful person, so they're all going, why don't you see how awesome you are? By the end, at least. _

_To this Luke, the rest of the party are equals instead of people to be looked up to and so it's her that's pointing out that the 13, 16, and so on year olds aren't all that mature themselves… _

_-_

"You're right: these soldiers are programmed replicas. They have to be." Tear closed the knight's eyes before meeting Luke's.

"Locking the doors so that we have to kill them if we want to escape? That's just _sick_." Luke closed her eyes for a moment. These poor babies might even have been made only yesterday. "It's a good thing I stocked up on holy bottles. If we have an option, we run."

No one argued.

"So, Jade…" Everyone braced themselves as Dist's chair descended when they were about to enter a large building. "You finally show your face."

Luke wasn't paying attention. Dist's chair floated. That meant he didn't have to walk. If Luke had Dist's chair, that meant that she wouldn't have to walk. That meant no more of those damn squares. "I want that chair! Natalia, shoot him out of it!" The others quickly figured out what Luke had.

"Now give that back!" Dist whined when the scuffle was over, held back by Jade's hand on his elaborate collar.

"Dist, do you see these?" Luke leaned forward, grinning and giving him an eyeful. Luke had never been especially modest. He had nice abs, he showed them off. She had nice breasts, she showed them off. There was also enough of her that was 'male' to enjoy the sight of nice boobs, even if they were her own and even smaller than Natalia's due to that whole annoying not enough body fat thing. "Do you know why I have them?"

"I had nothing to do with that!"

"But you worked for the guys that did. Now, do you know why they did it?"

"To kill you, but obviously that failed."

"Oh, it failed, it failed with a vengeance. There isn't much to see yet, but look." Luke pointed at her tummy. "I am around two months pregnant. I have food cravings like you wouldn't believe, I have mood swings, I'm exhausted, and my feet hurt. Having to walk all over the place _isn't helping_. Now that I have your chair, I won't have to walk anymore. You will tell me how to use it so I can leave this place on it, or you will carry it back to the Albiore for me so I can take it to Sheridan and let them examine it and learn all your secrets."

Dist struggled and glared impotently. "You, you…"

"The term is bitch."

-

"_Okay, I need to get it reupholstered because this is tacky, but other than that I _love_ this chair. Love it love it love it." _

"_Why are you telling me? I don't care."_

"_Because you're a captive audience until you swear not to touch my baby. I seem to recall _you_ abusing the privilege." _

Asch couldn't respond to that except by seething.

"_Seriously, what is so hard about not murdering and abusing children for you, Asch the Bloody?" _

"_It's not…"_

"_She's not what? A child? A person? Because she hasn't been born yet? Because she's composed mostly of seventh fonons and could be considered a replica even if she was conceived like an original? Like I'm not a person, just your replica? Your property? Your puppet?" _

"_You are my replica, and that is…" _Acknowledge that as his child? As a bastard, it wasn't legally his unless he admitted that it was, and then it would have a right to be a member of house Fabre, and…

"_Our parents have called me their child. In my own right. And if I'm property, then wouldn't I belong to Van? He made me, after all, not you. As property you have no right to me, and as a person you've never taken any responsibility for me. You're nothing but my older brother, or step-brother, take your pick, and my baby is nothing to you but your niece. " _

"_I'm your original…"_

"_So? And that makes us what? I'm your replacement? I quit. I'm your slave? I've escaped your control, and good luck getting me back. Slavery's illegal, for one thing. And if replicas are slaves that have to obey their originals, that would mean that you have to do whatever Lorelei says and you're not. We both heard what he said, Asch." _

"_I'm…"_

"_At least you have the honesty not to say it. You're not a replica? By what definition? You're a perfect isofon of someone else but you were born naturally. If my baby is a replica then so are you. She's even got first through sixth fonons in addition to seventh, even if she's mostly seventh." _Luke pet her tummy, feeling the little precious life there. She made it hard to care too much about idiots like Asch. There were more important things. _"People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, especially if they can't tell the difference between a window and a mirror." _

Asch's frustration resounded through the link.

"_Sound and fury… and now not even sound. You're just jealous. I have a life and a family and you threw away yours. Can't go back to Van, can't go back to the Order, and you won't go back to our family. What will you have when this is over? Don't blame me for taking it Asch. Although it was pretty stupid, in retrospect, how I was tricked into picking up your cast-offs. I can do so much better as myself." _

"_A woman's body, a child, you, you…"_

"_What are you raving about now?" _

"_My fonons are separating. They have been since Akzeriuth. It's because you were made, it's because you exist!"_

"…_and you're blaming me instead of Van… Why? I wasn't the one who did that to you. I wasn't even born yet, duh." _Luke considered it. _"You know, I might feel some sympathy for you if it weren't for the whole trying to kill my baby thing. You have no regard for other people's lives so I can see little reason to have much regard for yours. I think there's a word for this… Oh, yeah. Karma." _"Hey, Jade!"

Jade had to look up at her. Sweet. "What is it now?"

"Why didn't you tell me Asch was dying?"

"Patient-doctor confidentiality."

"Oh, right. Is there anything that we can do about it?"

"Luke, I know they're big words, but there are only three of them and I've explained them to you."

"You really can't tell us?" Everyone looked at Natalia. "Well, he is my cousin. By adoption, technically. Just like Luke, now that I think about it."

"No, I can't. Not unless Asch gives me permission. Signed permission, Luke, and/or in person. And no, I can't take anyone else's word for it. My credentials are on thin ice as it is."

"What did you do, Colonel? Some freaky experiments?" Anise wanted the gory details.

"It's more what I haven't done." He didn't have time to go sit in mandatory refresher courses or courses on new developments when he was saving the world and developing most of those new developments. He'd had some time to kill in Belkend, and there were some self-study ones, but… Oh well, he could always get licensed again later. "I tend to display a certain callousness towards human life unbecoming of the profession." It wasn't like anyone actually followed that oath nowadays, for one thing a soldier certainly couldn't abstain from causing injuries.

"_Are you going to tell me what's going on?"_

"_No."_

"_If you're dying anyway, and you're not telling me, then you're refusing my help. If I couldn't help the injury and I can't help fix it, then I see no reason to feel at all responsible for it if you die._" Luke peeled an orange. She'd figured out that angering Asch worked so much better than sweet reason, since he was an inherently angry and unreasonable person. _"Of course, Mother will be sad, and so will Natalia, even if you are a bastard to both of them and the people they love. As for Father… He tried not to get attached to us, because he knew we were going to die. He believed that he didn't have any chance of saving us, so it was just a matter of making it as easy for us as he could. If you believe in the Score, he was a great father. If you don't, then he's not, but now that he knows we have a chance now… He's trying," _Luke gave him that. _"He does care. You were watching when he gave Guy's sword back."_

Again, Asch didn't know how to respond.

"_And they thought_ I_ didn't know how to express myself…"_

-

"Guy, I as good as asked you if you wanted to be my baby's stepfather. Instead of saying yes, you get drunk with Jade and Natalia and end up catching her on the rebound. I'm happy for you, I really am, and I want you two to have tons of babies for my daughter to play with, and I'm really glad Natalia got over that bastard.

"But that night I got distracted from finding out that Jade can't sing by Asch complaining about the fact Natalia's half-naked and helping you psych yourself up to actually put those hands on her boobs on the bed across from him, and after you left the room since Natalia didn't want to risk him seeing any of what he's not getting his hands on I hear from Anise that when she and Ion came back you were both naked in the hallway and she had to cover Ion's virgin eyes."

Guy had only vaguely remembered that and had been hoping it was just a dream. His sloshed virgin near-teenage male brain cells had been mostly focused on the fact that there were boobies, he could touch them for up to fifteen seconds at that point, and they were soft, and hallelujah, he was going to lose his virginity!

Only he hadn't managed to.

"So I can't sleep with you, because that would be cheating on Natalia."

"Um, actually..."

Luke stared at him. "You broke up with her?" She was very, very disappointed in him. "Guy, if you broke up with her because she couldn't get you over a lifelong phobia in only a couple weeks I'm going to..."

"No no no no no, we're still, um, not exactly together since Natalia's a princess and..." Guy waved his arms frantically and tried to gather his thoughts. "Natalia said that since you needed another massage and Tear's busy I should try to figure out why I'm fine with you."

"If it's that you're used to me being a guy, then you're out of luck," Luke reminded him.

"Yeah, but you're safe, so if you as a girl are safe then Natalia thinks that if, um..." Oh thank Lorelei, Natalia was here!

"Natalia, are you sure you're okay with your boyfriend feeling me up?" Luke pointed at herself. "You know where I get those aches. My boobs are trying to grow but I don't have enough body fat no matter how much I eat since guys are mostly muscle, and..."

Natalia coughed. "Guy, could you go outside for a minute?"

Guy made his escape while Natalia gave Luke the noblewoman's version of The Talk.

"I don't remember it hurting." Luke frowned. "But then I might not have had a hymen anyway."

"From what I have heard it does, and it is especially painful for seventh fonists since the body regards its loss as an injury and it takes a bit of effort to remind it that it is something that needs to stay broken. Normally, one has one's first experience with someone older than oneself and experienced enough in these matters to make the experience enjoyable anyway. However, since Guy's phobia is based on those poor maids' deaths and the belief that if they touch him they will be hurt..."

"You losing your virginity to each other would hurt you and prettymuch confirm that phobia. So you're asking me to deflower your boyfriend so he doesn't freak out when he helps you lose your own virginity."

Natalia blushed a bit, but, "Yes, essentially. Otherwise it will just be a disaster for both of us."

Luke thought about saying "You do realize that since I'm keeping Asch locked up in my head he just heard all that?" but then thought better of it. Natalia knew that was how it worked, and the fact she hadn't brought it up meant she was repressing that bit because some part of her thought he deserved it.

And frankly, so did Luke. She had hormone swings, goddamn it, and she had boobs now. She might like long hair on guys, that was why his had been long when she was a guy, but she also liked nice abs (which was why he'd displayed his), Guy was hot, Luke had boobs, and she was not getting any.

Asch could just go handle himself. Only he couldn't because he was paralyzed, but it was the principle of the matter.

Guy was ushered in and Natalia ended up sitting in the corner in a strange parody of a noblewoman's chaperone. This was her... her Guy, after all, and the goings-on would be supervised.

"This will actually be my first time in my right mind," Luke realized as she undressed. She'd only done it before while the arte was controlling her.

"What should I, uh..."

Luke pointed at her boobs. "They ache. How far have you gotten with Natalia?"

"Ah, um..." Natalia was here, so this was okay, but...

"Guy, Luke is doing us a favor. And according to those biology books we've all been forced to read orgasms are marvelous for headaches and so on." Natalia waved him on.

Natalia knew that he'd stayed and watched Luke and Asch, something they didn't know (or Asch would have tried to kill him, not to mention Luke would have said something), and so her setting this up was wonderful, and evil, and probably partially because she wished she hadn't allowed her virgin eyes to force her to not watch the show.

So, yeah, boobs.

"How are they?" Luke asked, a big self conscious.

"Smaller than Natalia's." Guy realized he'd messed up immedietly afterwards. "They're still nice! Just Natalia's are nicer." Natalia was his sort of girlfriend, so he was supposed to consider her the best. He was saved!

Luke grumbled. "I need to eat more..." Luke had seven percent body fat as a male. A female needed at least fourteen percent, and sixteen was better even outside of pregnancy. No body fat meant no joint padding and no boobs, among a host of other problems.

Luke frankly looked like a bit of a stick, in her opinion, and she'd been decently vain as a man.

So, Guy knew, he should kneed them so they felt better, and he'd gotten up to putting his mouth on them.

"Keep doing that!" Luke grabbed him and he didn't flinch. This was Luke and Luke was safe.

Luke was also already wet.

He was not a horny teenager, he was a horny early twenties virgin and he'd raised Luke from functional infancy and he was going to make this good for her since her only experience had been essentially drugged rape and he knew Natalia was watching which meant he'd be in major trouble with both of them if he messed up and was ungentlemanly but Luke was also really, really hot, and so were Luke's hands.

"It's the grabbing thing that's the problem, right? Natalia, how far did you get?"

"He could touch me, but it was a bit of an effort to even manage to stroke him for a bit. It was terribly onesided." Natalia sighed.

"Let's see if we can work on that." Luke pumped him expertly: after all, Luke had been male until recently. "Hey! Who said you could stop!"

"Uh, sorry." Guy started moving his own hands again.

"Dammit..." Luke grumbled. "We can have more orgasms, right?"

"Yes," Natalia confirmed.

"I want one first, then." Luke pressed Guy down, the way Asch had been positioned, and the memory made him twitch. "He stops moving whenever I start doing anything and it's frustrating."

-

Luke grumbled under her breath.

"_What is it now?"_

"_If you promised not to touch my baby then you won't have to know or care."_

"…_Just tell me."_

"_I want to cuddle someone. My baby is already inside me, but I want to hold her in my arms. And I want to have someone to show her off to. I wish Lorelei could wake up again." _Lorelei understood. Would Lorelei think of her baby as a grandbaby or what Luke was to him? Did it matter? _"The baby books say that prenatal development is important. I could have her be born already, like replicas are, but it's not good for us and it wouldn't be for her. So I have to _wait_ and I want to hold her. I can listen to her, and sing to her, and I think if I were Lorelei that would be enough, but I'm human too and I want to cuddle. It's your fault, you know."_

"_How is this my fault?"_

"_If you weren't a jerk Natalia wouldn't have dumped you and hooked up with Guy. I can't randomly grab someone else's guy for cuddling purposes."_

"_I thought you liked Tear?"_

"_I was a little boy who wanted a mommy, or part of me was, and part of her wants someone to mother. You know how she is about cute things. But she's so focused on suppressing that instinct that the potential teased me and the temptation teased her. Now, though, I'm the one who has someone to mother, and that means I want a," _Luke hesitated. A father for her child? Her child had one, and she did not want to give Asch the mistaken impression that she wanted anything to do with the jerk or that he would be allowed anywhere near her baby. _"A partner. Or, now that I think about it, more like a minion. Guy's generally the one who does stuff for me, but I can't order a manservant to get over here and let me cuddle him. That's sexual harassment. Hmm."_

Ion was still a child, and he was Anise's. Or, really, Anise was the minion there but she was also the bossy one. Luke wanted to be the non-minion and bossy one. So, she needed someone who wanted to do stuff for her.

Tear? Was non-minion and non-bossy. Jade was… nope, total personality and priority clash. Non-minion and bossy. Guy was minion but non-bossy, Natalia was non-minion and bossy, which might be why they were getting along so well now…

Ion would be non-minion and non-bossy, Anise bossy minion, of course.

Boy-Luke… minion and bossy. Which was why he had fit with Tear. Van… non-minion and actually non-bossy. He didn't so much try to order people around as make them want to do what he wanted them to. _"This is an interesting way to classify people. Hmm… You're a… minion and…"_

"_Don't call me a minion!"_

"_Hey, I admitted I was one. Think of it terms of wanting to please others or wanting to be pleased, and wanting to control others or... Hmm." _

"_Try active and passive." _

"_That doesn't work either. Van's anything but passive." _

"_Honest or manipulative?" _

"_Ion's not manipulative. Or yes he is, sort of, but he doesn't manipulate others, he sort of positions himself in situations to try not to be killed."_ They were being amazingly civil, for them. _"Hmm. You kind of suck at being bossy. You try to, but you can't pull it off."_

"_What do you mean?"_

"_Maybe it's plan versus inspire? I like planning, and knowing what the plan is. You can't plan, Asch. You can't get people to do what you want. You did inspire Natalia, though. That promise meant so much to her." _And Asch had trampled on it. _"I think you try to take the lead, like in Ortion Cavern, but you aren't that good at it. I mean, Tear stayed behind, Guy left you, the others would have been a lot more help if they'd had a clue what was going on and it's the leader's job to make sure of that… Actually, Van doesn't clue people in on the plan at all, does he. And when he finally does is generally the time people abandon him, if they do. So you're a minion who needs someone else to do the planning." _

"_I'm not an organizer." _Asch admitted that.

"_So… I want someone who wants to make me happy and needs me to do the organizing, so does Natalia, Guy's vice-versa. Anise wants someone she can make happy and needs her to do the organizing, Ion needs someone who will make him happy and do the organizing, so they match. Jade… you know, he might actually be non-bossy. The problem there, if he is, would be that he's so good at it that he's not going to let anyone else do it unless they're better. Jade's _hard. _He's good at hiding who he is."_ Luke looked at him speculatively. _"He said something about me only letting someone control me if they proved they were worthy. He's right, I did a pretty good job of pretending to be a non-minion with everyone but Van." _

"_You're not seriously considering… He's five times your age!"_

"_So?" _Hmm. Jade was really good at getting stuff done for Peony, and he actually hated having to be the one to explain and organize everything, given how he dumped that on Luke and Guy at every opportunity. _"Oh, Professor Nebilim. And Nephry's doll."_

"_What are you talking about?"_

"_Jade invented fomicry not for himself, but to save other people and make them happy." _Hmm. _"One hell of a battle there, though. Unless I do what Peony does and keep it on a level he doesn't object to… But would Peony put up with that?" _

"_Are you saying Peony and Jade are…"_ Asch inadvertently sent a mental image.

"_Oooh, that would be pretty. I love long hair, that's why I had long hair in the first place." _That aside, "_Peony's bossy. And definitely not a minion. So… What's Ginji like?"_

"_I neither know nor care. Could we please stop having this conversation?"_

"_Captive audience, remember? Unless you're willing to promise."_

Luke was pretty sure that she was wearing him down, from the emotions that accompanied the silence. _"So, to continue… Noelle's a non-minion and non-bossy and I'd guess Ginji's the same. Noir's… bossy as all hell, but fundamentally a minion, like Anise. She's just got an entire city of people she's trying to make happy. Um… Who else do I know that's even in the running? Well, while I'm at it… The god-generals are all as minion-like as it gets. Legretta was bossy, Dist isn't although he tries, Arietta and Sync are kids, Largo… I wonder if it's the older people get the harder it is to figure them out? Jade said something about personalities not really developing until you were forty or something." _

"_You say that Sync's a child and not Ion?"_

"_Yes. Van is good at keeping people children, isn't he? He promises us acknowledgement and never delivers." _But she didn't need that. Regardless of whether anyone ever acknowledged her or not, she needed to be an adult, she knew that now. And so she would be, and there was no point in worrying about it and needing someone to tell her whether or not she was ready because she would not fail and that was that. _"I think all kids are minions. They need someone to tell them if they're doing it right or not, because they don't know yet." _

"_So how on earth is Ion a non-minion, then?"_

"_Because Ion was never allowed to be a child," _Luke told Asch sadly, and Asch had to agree. _"My baby… I'll protect her, and I'll tell her when she's doing things right and tell her she's wrong and what to do instead when she is. I'll challenge her so she grows strong and when she challenges me and deserves to win I'll acknowledge her. I'll never lie to her." _

"_You seriously think you can raise a child?"_

"_Jade himself said I was a lot better qualified than most people. And I want to raise her, not just have her, that's part of it. I want to watch her grow up." _

"_I just don't get you," _Asch admitted.

"_You're only realizing this now? And we're reflections of each other, Asch, and that means we look the same but we're complete opposites." _


	5. You and me and

_In which things are worked out, for a certain degree of worked out, and Asch has the breakthrough he must wish he'd had before the end of the game/Luke's death…_

_-_

"Okay. So shutting off the planet storm nipped everything they had going in the bud. Without it they just don't have enough power for Eldrant. The only thing that could restart it is the Key, which I have, and now that Dist is gone the only people Van has left with enough power to try to get it are himself and Sync." Sync should have died after casting that arte and falling into the core but Van had revived him. They had _made sure of_ the other God-generals, after they'd survived Mt. Roneal.

"So we're almost finished with this?"

"I wish. No, Natalia. While things were going his way Van didn't really care if we found out what he was up to. Now that they're most definitely not he'll start getting sneaky and Van? Is very, very good at sneaky." Touching her stomach gently Luke's eyes grew sad. "I want it over with, but we have the upper hand. He's not going to move until he does."

"_Are you okay?"_

"_No. I want a minion, someone who will promise me they'll protect and take care of me or die trying, but I'm the leader and I have to be strong. I can't ask for hugs."_

"_It sounds like you want a knight more than a minion."_

"_Oh, think about what a knight in shining armor _does_. Guy's one. But if I let them see that I want someone else that will let them know that I'm not certain I can do it by myself. They need to have confidence in me. Man, you really don't know anything about leadership, do you?" _

"_My model was Van."_

"_Van works in the shadows. It's his element. It's subtleties and confusion and I don't get that."_

"_Ahem."_

"_What?"_

"_I used to work for Van. I know how he works, even if his tendency to leave people out of the loop meant the entire replica world idea surprised me. I used to be the god-general in charge of _Special Operations, _which is the nice name for spying, assassination, and other things the Order doesn't want to know the Order is doing, much less anyone else_. _I _know_ tactics and trickery even if I may not be the best at strategy."_

This time Luke was the one who didn't know how to answer.

"_I may be a bastard, but I'm actually good at it. Not that you've seen me at my best, admittedly."_

"_I can't let you free. If you have access to your power you'll try to hurt my baby." _No. She'd fight Van herself, no matter how long it took, instead of trade her child's life for the possibility of a quick end to this.

"_And I can't promise you I won't."_

"_Why not?!" _Why? Why couldn't he just leave her baby alone? Did he have to attack or destroy by his very existence everything that made her happy?!

"_Because I hurt people!"_ Asch yelled back, angry now. _"I'm a bastard and a jerk and I hurt you, my family, Natalia, everyone! I let Akzeriuth be destroyed, I helped Van get that far willingly, and I'm an idiot! You're right, I was practically begging for him to take advantage of me and pinning the blame on you! Are you happy now?!" _

"_Why would that make me happy? Acknowledging the truth doesn't change it." _

"_You realized that you fucked up and changed yourself after Akzeriuth."_

"_If you want me to believe that you're actually going to change, then swear that you're not going to hurt my baby."_

"_I just explained why I can't promise that! I hurt everything I touch! And I won't swear not to touch your child because like it or not she's my baby too and I won't turn my back on anyone for stupid reasons anymore! That's, she's my child and I have a responsibility and you are not going to force me to turn my back on it any more than I should have let Van trick me into turning my back on my family in the first place!" _

The others had noticed the telltale signs that Luke was talking to Asch and known better than to interrupt, but now they started to wonder if they should.

Asch continued, _"Yes, I run away from my responsibilities and I pin the blame on other people and I'm not going to be anything resembling a good father but _I am._ And that's the way it is! If you want me to accept that she's a person, or going to be one instead of just a thing then what do you think that means?! Why do you think I didn't want to accept it?! Because if you're people then you're my family and…" _He didn't know how to say what that meant, except a lot. _"You wanted to make up for what you did to me by taking my family. If I'm the one that did you wrong, and you've forced me to admit it, then I have to try to make it up to you. You don't have to like it any more than I liked your attempts."_

"_Do you actually mean that?"_

"_I can't promise anything. But you can put me back into a coma or whatever with your power if I misbehave, can't you?" _If this had been a physical conversation Asch would have been looking to the side, scowling, pouting and blushing slightly simultaneously. _"I suppose I can't undo all this any more than you could Akzeriuth. But I at least need to_ try _to clean up my own mess."_

"_Mess?" _

"_Yes. My life is a huge mess. But I didn't mean it that way. You're not garbage and I'm sorry for calling you that." _How much was Luke going to force him to admit of all this shameful and embarrassing stuff?

"…_I'll be watching you._" They all knew that was as good as an agreement.

"_You'll probably need to. Don't expect miracles."_

"_I know, I've done this myself. It's hard."_

"_If you can do it, I can."_

"_Riiiight."_

"_Just watch me."_ Half challenge, half…

"_I will." _Challenge accepted, help promised. "_But I can't watch you if you're dead."_

"_Jade said that Lorelei should be able to save me." _Or, more precisely, that nothing else had any chance of preventing this.

"_Then we'll just have to free Lorelei. If… If there's any chance, then I want my daughter to have her father." _

"_Luke… I'm dying. But I'm not the one that would end up dead."_

_-_

"Jade."

"Yes?"

Luke closed his study's door behind her. "I looked it up. Patient-doctor confidentiality does not cover threats to other people's health like this."

This was more than half-expected, from watching Asch and Luke interact. "Telling you wouldn't have done any good."

"That's what the Order used to say about Scores of death. Like the Score predicting Akzeriuth. And you didn't tell me I was a replica, either."

"The only thing that can save you is Lorelei, and you are already doing your best to free Lorelei. I suppose I could say I didn't want to distract you, or wanted you to be happy until the possible end, but I suppose what it comes down to is that I've never been able to handle death. I don't think it was so much lack of ability to understand it as denial of it, all along. They call medicine a war against death, do you know that? They also say that true courage is to fight a losing battle regardless. But I've never really gotten the hang of losing."

Jade turned to another page that he had also read before. "When we discussed your origins, do you remember that someone commented that perhaps I should be regarded as your father? You are, Lorelei willing, the closest thing I will ever have to a child. And I can fight beside you, I can fight for you, but I cannot win. Only your… other parent, perhaps, may. I told Asch so that he would go to the requisite effort to keep himself alive and delay the Big Bang effect's occurrence. But to tell you… would have made it real."

"If it were only my life on the line… But, Jade? If Asch's soul takes my body, mine will take my daughter's."

Jade turned, raised an eyebrow. "If that is the case… I may have something. It would take control of the seventh fonon equal to that of the Daathic Fonic Arte that caused all this, or perhaps greater, but it's something. How much do you know about the phenomenon that causes identical twins?"

-

"I'm reading them, I'm reading them," Asch told Luke when she knocked on the door. Now that he had his body back he had physical reactions again, and he couldn't erase the too-vivid memory of the… not so much moment of insanity but several hours of impossible bliss that had brought about the reason he was currently reading not only baby care books but guides for pregnant women. At first he had partially wanted to get rid of the baby so that Luke would switch back and he would have a male body, but if he was accepting responsibility he would take it. And if the baby would be Luke's new body then he truly, truly would have to take care of her.

Luke was… gorgeous, and he was seventeen, and _the memories_.

"Jade says there's a possibility that if you move into my body and I move into the baby's that I might be able to create a new vessel for the baby's spirit and contain it until I can, or you can I guess, carry her to term. If I sort of… bud it off, like an identical twin, then I could possibly even have both of us born at the same time. The Big Bang Effect would have first have you enter me, then gradually force me out so I would have time to arrange that, then I would be gradually forcing out my, our daughter, so I could 'catch' her fonons and construct a body around them. Not possession but reincarnation. It… I'd rather find Lorelei first." Luke sighed. "But it looks like we should be able to pull this off."

"That's a relief." It was, it truly was.

"I get that you're going to protect her, and me. But…" The original discussion had been about slightly different matters.

"I am a red-blooded male, and I have the same memories that you do. I won't turn you down, if… If you want that." It wasn't like Natalia hadn't moved on.

"I was a virgin, so I probably won't be anywhere near as good without the arte making me go nuts."

"I wasn't a virgin, but that was the first time in my life I was actually bothering about the other person's pleasure. And it's a lot harder to, well, satisfy a woman than a man. I doubt I'll be the one with a right to complain about someone's performance."

"I'm horny. I've been in a body all this time, unlike you, and I have _boobs_ and it's not like I could masturbate with you watching." Asch had curled up and died during Luke and Guy's experimentation.

Asch stared. "You really do have no modesty."

"It wastes time." And who knew how much they had of that? "And if I didn't have any modesty I would have taken care of myself despite you. I have hormone swings as well as mood swings, you know."

"I suppose. Do you think…" He tried to open their connection: Luke allowed it. _"That we could share sensations?"_

"_I suppose that would let us know what works and what doesn't." _Luke took the book out of Asch's hands, put in a smaller book to keep the place, and put it down on the pile of books. "_This is my room, you know." _

"_I gathered, since that chair is here." _Dist's chair.

"_My throne." _Luke grinned and sat down on Asch's lap. _"I'll let know which of you I love more after I give riding you a try."_

_-_

Afterwards they lay entwined, body and mind, and Asch realized that the contented Luke was no longer barring him from her, no, _their _daughter when he heard a small wisp of dreaming song that shared their voice but was not either of them. _"May I_?" He knew better than to touch without permission: this trust was still too new.

Luke answered by pulling him closer, letting him share Luke's own connection to the singer and thus restoring Asch's. _"Isn't she beautiful?" _Asch remembered how much of Luke's desire of someone to share her burden with had been for someone to share her joy in the child, their daughter, as well.

"_I can hear her, but I can't see her."_

"_That's because you aren't listening right." _

Oh. She didn't really look human yet, not at all. But then a baby's shape was different from an adult's. It would have been ugly if he didn't know what she would grow into, like a caterpillar would become a butterfly. If it lived, if she lived.

Utterly helpless, unable to even survive outside the shelter of Luke's body. She did not demand, she didn't have the concept of it, but she needed. She needed them, she needed… Well, she could live without_ him_, but he wanted to hold her. To help protect her.

There had been so little happiness for them, but their daughter's song was content, happy, as she grew and was warm and was held and had everything she could want and the person she did not yet know as 'mother' but 'everything' sang to her and loved her.

And now he touched her, and there was no fear or comprehension of fear. A trust of total innocence. A blind kitten licking at his hand, so easily crushed but he simply couldn't.

No wonder Luke and Natalia had thought he was a monster for even contemplating it.

"_I've caused the deaths of so many. There's no way to pay it back. But I can't fix the past, but I can make the future better. I can create life, not just destroy it." _So amazing, her daughter, such a miracle, to think that she could, could have a chance like this, be trusted with something so precious and so fragile.

"_It's not as though it's an honor or a prize. Just about anyone can make one of these."_ And in fact, that made Asch a little sick. This was what he had been? What Van had been, what Arietta had been, what they all had been, and life had twisted them into what they were? How had it been allowed to happen? He knew, by people. _"What kind of world would we be bringing her into?" _He had the sudden mad desire to keep her locked her up inside Luke and lock Luke up in a tower somewhere, and kill anything that even looked at the tower. He knew he couldn't get away with that, and after all it hadn't worked for Luke (not that he would allow anyone like Van inside, of course), and so the only recourse was to teach her how to defend herself as soon as possible, and…

"_Asch, breathe!"_

Oh, right. Yes. As such a powerful seventh fonist he could go without long enough that sometimes he stopped bothering when something that urgent (terrifying, more like) came up that he needed to contemplate (spaz about).

"_Everyone has the chance to live and redeem themselves by default too, you know."_

"_Actually, we only have this despite the Score…" _If Asch were Lorelei there would be fewer Hods allowed to happen and more smiting. Van was right, human nature had been behind Hod, human nature combined with the Score, and therefore Lorelei had been forced to choose between what free will humanity had (they could at least choose to fight or submit, choose their route to their fate), and human lives. Freedom or peace.

It was probably selfish of Asch to both want his daughter to have freedom and no one else to have the free will to choose to lay a finger on her, but there were apparently good and bad sides to selfishness and he personally wished his father had possessed more of this sort.

Alright, the first order of business would be to kill Van and make sure he stayed very dead, since he would be coming after Luke and their daughter by extension, then to destroy the Score since he was not permitting his daughter to have any sort of inescapable fate that he couldn't rescue her from or at least raise her right enough that she could rescue himself, and of course free Lorelei so that they wouldn't have to waste any time going through that whole rebirth nonsense that could be spent on his daughter, and then succeed his father as Duke of Belkend so that he could have some actual medical research happen there, just in case, and then start interviewing tutors and do very, _very _thorough background checks, or perhaps Luke would want to handle teaching her (meaning there was no chance of her tutor being another Van), and of course he would need to ensure world peace, and…

Only a little more than sixth months left until she was born! And he'd wasted all that time!

"_Who said you get to kill Van?"_

"_If you fight him he will aim for our daughter. That is not acceptable. You can kill him, if you're willing to let me hold our daughter during it."_

"…_Hell no. Alright, alright. I think I'm starting to get more of this gender stuff. I think it has to do with priorities more than anything." _

"_Delegation? I can't plan, not when it's something this important. You handle that, just tell me who to kill and what exactly needs to be done so I don't have to worry this much _all the time_." _The thing about battles, Asch realized, is that they had beginnings and ends. Once Van was dead, that problem was solved. Children were always there, at least until they grew up and moved out, and it wasn't one task to make sure that happened but thousands, like feeding them, and getting them dressed, and diapers, and…

"_I think being a leader has a lot of parts to it. But I can do that, I'm used to keeping track of things like how much food we have and item usage and weapon stats so I know what to buy and price comparing and…" _

"…_I never knew shopping was so complicated."_

"_It is if you do it right. It's like warfare, only you're spending gald instead of troops." _And Luke had always liked fighting, but only if no one got hurt. It wasn't like he'd had much to do or look forward to at the manor besides practice. _"And no one gets killed, unless you _really _mess up, run out of life bottles, and let Tear die."_ That hadn't happened and she wasn't going to let it. _"So it's _really_ spending gald instead of lives. And it's easy to keep track of your score." _Bwa ha ha ha.

"_How rich are you?"_

"_Currently I've got other priorities, but let's just say that our daughter will_ never_ be outdoors alone without not only a full supply of bottles and gels but a rebirth doll until she moves out and leave it at that." _She wouldn't want her to equip it all the time in battle: that would be wasteful and teach her bad habits like wasting items, but as yet another insurance policy. Assassins didn't give you a chance to switch equipment.

"…_you're already planning out her stat growth?"_

"_I'll have to redesign to suit her individual fighting style, of course, but it makes me happy." _For instance, they were both sword wielders, entirely in her case and primarily in Asch's case, but their daughter was going to learn to heal as soon as possible and while of course she would have to be adept at close-range combat in case there weren't any people nearby to guard her while she was casting if she decided to be primarily a fonist a staff, or perhaps a spear might be better suited. In fact, the best weapon for a normal seventh fonist (who needed to stay distant from the enemy since the healer could _not _be allowed to place herself at risk but still had to be able to attack) was the bow, that was the entire basis of the Lanvaldear style, and Luke had already made Natalia promise to teach her daughter if she wanted to learn it, but…

Asch hesitated. On the one hand, he wanted to teach her himself and that meant the sword, but the idea of his daughter being able to kill people before they went anywhere near her held a certain appeal.

"_I wasn't sure if I could change the world and save it at the same time. I mean, we have to stop Van _and_ the Score. Now that I have a child, though, it's not if I can but I have to. The things that happened to me… part of me still thinks I deserve them, but I _know_ she doesn't and they are not happening to her. They are just _not._" _Period.

"_You said that all children are minions. I wonder if the difference between children and adults is who they serve."_

"_Living up to the past or creating the future?"_

"_Perhaps. Whether our job is to learn or to teach." _

"_We'll have to think about that, since we're going to be helping her grow up." _

Asch knew better than to let Luke catch even the slightest hint of the fact that part of Asch wanted to keep her a child forever so that he could keep her safe. Asch knew it was ridiculous and Luke would _not _react well to someone wanting to stunt their child's growth the way hers, or theirs, had been.


	6. You don't matter

_In which the plot ends, of course for a given value of plot. I'm not happy about the… nevermind, you can review with concrit and spot it for me. There'll be a several years later epilogue-thing next weekend: I'm posting this in sections per recent usual._

-

"So… What do you think about Luke and Asch kissing and making up?" Guy wasn't sure how to feel about it.

"Well…" Natalia didn't know either. "I suppose that it's not very likely that Asch is pretending all this. It seems real, and dramatic. Like Luke's change after Akzeriuth." Only with a new wardrobe instead of a haircut. Luke liked long hair on men. And nice abs. Natalia wasn't complaining.

"If he hurts her I'll kill him, but that would be after the fact, you know?" Guy would rather keep it from happening in the first place, which was why he had given Asch that death threat as a deterrent.

Asch had growled at him to get in line, and it looked like the first one in that line would be Asch himself.

"Yes, of course," Natalia agreed, although she was mostly thinking about something else. "He's acting a lot like… No, he simply doesn't know what he's doing. I suppose, considering the others… There was nothing there but hate. I don't think he knows how to show that he cares unless it's to manipulate and lie, as Van did. He seems embarrassed. It's not just shyness." She had hoped it was that, when she and Asch were attempting to find their way back to understanding each other, trying to regain what they'd had as children. "How strange. I always thought that Asch, or my Luke, and I would be together, and you and this Luke, even if as servant and master, and here we are. Or, I suppose not exactly. They are planning to raise the child together, and I can't see them… Of course it is possible that they'll not get married, in fact would it even be legal? Our country's laws will need to be changed to account for replicas…"

Marriage. Of course, Guy obviously wanted children, and he wasn't going to let them be illegitimate, so of course he was going to get married, but even if he was technically a duke his duchy had sunk into the miasma and there was now not much but scythed-bare islands with a permanent storm over them left of the Hod Archipelago. Well, yeah, there were Feres' ruins and the replicas there, which he was going to take responsibility for, of course, but Natalia was the future Queen of Kimlasca and… Well, who was she going to marry? If she wasn't the rightful heir then Asch was, but Asch had repudiated his family ages ago and his claim to the throne recently. Natalia really should marry back into the royal family, not even a, um…

Was Guy technically a Malkuth nobleman? He'd never personally sworn any oaths and you couldn't really get more broken a king-liegeman oath than what Malkuth had done to Hod. Which essentially meant that Feres, and Guy, were independent. So, if he married Natalia, one of their kids would be the next Duke of Hod/Feres, and so Kimlasca would have title to the place.

That would probably be enough of an incentive for the king and nobles to go for it. He'd probably be stuck with Prince Consort to a Queen Regnant instead of King, but…

He was 22, Natalia was 18, so… And if they had kids, they could play with Luke's, and… "Um, Natalia?"

"What is it, Guy?"

"Um…" Was there some way to ask a woman if it was okay to ask her to marry him? Maybe Jade would know, he'd been raised a commoner. Nobles were engaged as children and didn't have to worry about this. The _last_ thing you wanted was to be in love with your spouse. If you were in love with them then you could fall out of love and that sort of thing led to wars. Of course, most commoners married who the Score told them to also, so maybe that wouldn't help.

Were they even compatible? Let's see, she was hot, and competent, and really helpful with the whole phobia thing. If she could put up with that she could put up with the rest of his quirks, probably. Like the whole fontech thing, she was fine with that. If he could use it for public works projects she'd be all for it, even, and that meant he could do really cool stuff with fontech… Oh yeah, there was a biggie. "How many children would you want to have? I mean, theoretically."

"Hmm… Well, at least two, obviously." The traditional heir and a spare. "And I want a daughter, of course, and I always wanted a sister," so four, "and obviously the Lanvaldear style needs to be passed on. Luke and I were only children, so we wanted to have a huge family. And if I married a noble their family line would have to continue as well." For instance, Luke or Asch was the next Duke of Belkend. "Is there any particular reason you're asking?" Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

"What a coincidence, I always wanted to have a lot of kids too. Hey, if you had a son first, and they married Luke's daughter, wouldn't that solve the succession problem?"

"Well, I don't think we should order people to marry each other anymore. That is obviously one of the Score-bound traditions that need to be discarded. And women mature faster than men, so if my son were too much younger than Luke's daughter he would probably be far too juvenile to interest her." Marry someone around five years older than you if you want decent conversation: that noblewoman's truism had really been hammered into Natalia by the entire Luke situation. Well, Asch was only one year younger than her, but it seemed to be a significant one. "What about you, Guy? What would you think about Luke becoming an in-law that way?" Luke would be Guy's cousin-in-law if he married Natalia.

"Well, we're already family. No harm in making it official." So… okay. "There's a bit of a problem, though. The Gardios' family's jewelry got looted, including the ring my father gave my mother."

"I could look through the records and find out what happened to them, Guy. In fact, I'll do that as soon as we next visit Baticul."

Okay, so that sounded like a yes. And… "Do you think Asch and Luke would ever tie the knot?" Double ceremony?

"Well, they wouldn't want their daughter to be considered a bastard. If we put it to them that way, then perhaps. Why don't we speak with Aunt Suzanne about that?" As both the mother and future mother-in-law of both parties she would be best able to pressure them.

"That sounds like a good idea."

-

Lorelei was happy.

Oh, it wasn't a happiness derived from laughter at those trapped by fate. It wasn't the self-righteousness he'd actually thought that Lorelei had to possess, that all this was good and going according to plan. It wasn't the knowledge that anything would turn out okay.

There was still the deep mourning that Van had sensed from Lorelei since absorbing it. There was still the self-hate and the hopelessness that came from both the Score it was (trapped by) and Van dooming it and the world whose memory it was.

Or perhaps he should say that Lorelei was still desperately unhappy, but there was something that was making it happy, just a little, a fragile delicate joy like what caused it.

Lorelei loved Asch, and the replica as well. Van had been enough entangled with it when it sent them the Key to sense that, the desire to protect them, its precious isofons. The helpless desire. Van had told Lorelei that they were doomed, and Lorelei had not been able to argue.

But this was not in the Score. This was not in his plan. They should have melted into each other and dissolved along with the new manifestation in that very instant, flooding the world with seventh fonon, more than enough to speed Eldrant to completion despite all the damage the replica had done to Van's plan.

Instead, they had not only survived calling into existence a new isofon of Lorelei but decided to keep it. The arte they had cast had been broken and the thing still lived.

Perhaps happiness wasn't even the right world. A delight, a bit of, of hope. Hope had brought fear with it, the other side of the coin, and Van enjoyed that, because Lorelei had despaired before and it was hard to torment something that already despaired. Lorelei had grown used to the knowledge that it was doomed and so it was hard to make it suffer any more.

Something beautiful, something precious to it. But then Asch and Luke had always been precious to it. Auldrant had always been. Yet it had known for two millennia that they were doomed. This new life was a new child.

Love, joy, loss, pain.

So he gave up and let it stay awake, for the moment, because the more it hoped, the happier it was, the more he could crush it. Something that had drifted helplessly in the very core for millennia? Didn't have much farther to fall. Also, he could reach along the link somewhat, or more tap into what Lorelei felt, and it was disconcerting.

Eventually, however, Lorelei weakened: reaching them had been exhausting even before he captured it. What it did then was unexpected. _"Thank you, Child of Yulia." _Its power twined around him both affectionately and sadly as he stood there in shock.

Lorelei was easily sealed away again, and Van should have been grateful, but those words took all the victory out of it. He wanted vengeance, on Lorelei and this world, and it thanked him! He wanted revenge, he wanted an enemy, not someone who…

…just like Asch had wanted to hate the replica Luke and be hated back.

But that thing had no right to see him as a lost child!

-

The way to kill Van was simple, in fact, simple enough it was intolerable to Asch at first. They, Luke and he, had loved Van, mad as he was. They had all loved the man Van had pretended to be, or perhaps tried to be was the better word. The child that had been murdered at Hod, the one used to destroy his home and told that it was his destiny, that all the torment visited on his people was justified because he was a monster and would one day kill them all even _before_ they had decided to force him since he would not, he would never.

Just as Van had forced Luke, in the end. Van had been blamed for Hod, felt guilt and a need to atone for it, but he wasn't responsible any more than Luke had been for Akzeriuth, both their powers forced out of control.

Van had become what they'd tried to make him, the one Van would rather have died than be. The one they couldn't bear to see him as. Asch, Luke, Guy, Tear: they all loved the real Van. And the man they loved, their teacher, friend, brother, had wanted the world's freedom. Had wanted, once upon a time, not to be used to kill.

Asch still wanted to get through to him, to revive the person who had died before Asch had met his ghost. Yet, that person would not want to live with this. Eldrant, this insane scheme, had been the only way he could see to both get vengeance and to atone. If the Score did this, destroyed his home and made children murderers, then the Score needed to be destroyed.

Perhaps if Lorelei were separated from Van, if they captured him, they could fix his mind. That, however, Van would never forgive them for, would be the ultimate perversion of their powers, worse than the Score.

The kindest thing, what Van would have wanted, the way he always told them to be was to just kill him. If someone was your enemy, if they would not change and needed to die for you to do what you must then they needed to die. Guilt would change nothing.

It was speaking with Lorelei, realizing that Lorelei did not want to live either that forced Asch to recognize what their best and perhaps only option was. Lorelei had spent two millennia experiencing the memories of all the score-bound. As a manifestation of the seventh fonon, what Lorelei wanted was for life to continue. Individual identity as a person didn't matter to it the way it did to a human whose self was their own personal self instead of millions of selves, all those who lived, who the fonon protected. Lorelei saw no difference between another person's death and its own. In fact, Lorelei could be said to value its personality less than the life of any peasant in Engave, because if a person died then they died but the fonon that Lorelei was a manifestation of would endure as long as Auldrant did.

For Asch, who had had his identity taken from him and until now hadn't been able to truly realize his own worth as an individual Lorelei's perspective was almost impossible to understand until he managed to think of it as a tree shedding leaves to endure the winter. Lorelei saw itself as a leaf, a manifestation that had come about to save Auldrant from the war that had created the miasma and only managed such a costly delaying action.

Lorelei didn't need to be freed. The fonon needed to be freed from humanity's control, but Lorelei was expendable. Luke couldn't see it that way but Asch was a soldier.

Sacrifices were acceptable for the greater good, but only self-sacrifices. No one had the right to use another as a pawn.

If they used hyperresonance to erase Van, convert him into blank seventh fonon without any self or memories, then he would die. Seventh fonists were said to live on in the fon belt, their personality and memories surviving in the fonons that had been within them while they lived. That legend was true. Van hadn't wanted to spend eternity bearing the guilt for what he had done. Eldrant's hyperresonance would have overwritten everything in order to overwrite the Score and Lorelei, everything including Van's own self.

Asch could understand wanting to die to atone for a crime. Only Van couldn't simply kill himself or get himself killed assassinating the Emperor who had ordered that done to Hod or anything along those lines, not with a baby sister to look after, a world to save, and a power that would force him to endure, carrying his guilt, even after his own death.

They both wanted to see Van again, at least. Say goodbye. But would he have wanted them, anyone to see him like this?

Luke didn't like it. Luke couldn't, not a being of the same nature as Lorelei, the guardian of all. Still Luke had learned how to force herself to kill for the sake of helping those she cared for, and if they waited too much longer Van might give up on the hope of figuring out some way to bring about Eldrant. If that happened, then Van would throw subtlety to the winds and use Lorelei's power to kill as many of the Score-bound fools he hated as he could before he was brought down. It was far, far too easy to destroy with their power.

A good fight, as opposed to an honorable one, was one where the target was never given a chance to fight back, where they never saw you coming, where you were nowhere near the scene of the crime and hence you (and the Order) couldn't be held responsible.

Forget cutting Lorelei out of Van so Van would lose the power that they would like to believe was the only thing that made him too dangerous to live. Forget letting him live, a danger to their world and their child.

The right way to do it was for Luke to fight Lorelei for control of the fonons in Van's body, both the ones that made up Van and those that made up Lorelei, and while Lorelei fought to keep the conflict from setting off hyperresonances that would have destroyed both him and Yulia's child…

Before Van had even an instant to register that something was going on, Asch could use his control of the fonon to force Van into a destructive hyperresonance the way that machine had. So Van could die the way Hod had, his own power turned to calamity.

It was the most logical, the most appropriate, the perfect way no matter how much they hated it.

Lorelei survived. For a few moments they thought that Lorelei would disperse, feeling Van die despite his efforts to protect him (bound by both Yulia's hymn and his own nature) the final failure that would make him decide that the fonon was better off with Luke as its lone sentience.

That Auldrant would be better off without the one who had failed to prevent the war that had ravaged it, whose best effort to preserve it had been such a nightmare.

"_I want my daughter to have her family. All of them." _As Luke had never had Van's love and now never could.

That was her name? Luke had named her daughter before she'd decided that child's gender… after the world? After what Luke fought to protect, after what Luke had been sealed away from in the manor, after… Everything?

"_You don't like it?" _The battle might be over, they might be back in their bodies but it wasn't over enough that they had pulled apart, that speaking this way didn't feel more natural, their minds weaving and embracing.

"_No wonder you couldn't bear that I wanted to destroy her." _She meant that much to Luke, and Asch had tried to destroy her as Van had her namesake. _"It's a wonderful name._"

"_The new world._" Lorelei, reaching back to them, to their child. _"The world reborn, a new beginning._" A tentative smile, a tentative happiness. "_But can I be trusted with her?"_

"_I'm letting Asch touch her, aren't I? I'm a fragment of your soul, our soul, and I'm her mother. You're her family. Maybe we won't be the best family, but you can't pick family." _Thoughts of Van leaked from Luke a bit, but they couldn't see the contents. _"So we'll all have to do our best for her. We won't let ourselves fail her, I won't. I didn't want to lose Van, but I had to. My daughter will have her family and they will love her for herself. We can't fix the past, but the future is unwritten now. We won't fail that future."_

_-_

A/N: In his final battle Asch says that "It's not about logic!" which is tantamount to admitting that no, he's not sane at all at that point. The battle that he claims is to confirm his identity is really over nothing more than who Van loves more. Even up until the end, Asch never broke free of Van's control. After the end, of course, is another story.

The final battle here might seem anticlimactic, and that's because it is. The climax has already happened, Van is no longer the center of their lives, no longer someone that they should put themselves at risk to give a fair fight. If Luke had used his power more in the game... Luke is, as Lorelei says, Lorelei's equal and own self. Luke is god-mode, and very, very capable of doing any number of nasty things to Van. Instead he fights him as a human, in essence going easy on him, partially due to fear of his power after Akzeriuth, partly due to other issues, and mostly because he fundamentally is still centered around Van because he's a seven year old child and Van is his father/creator. It's not like the party steps up to the plate: they still think he's a teen in every sense but birthdate.

In this, however, Van is their past, they have another future that they value/love more, and I like big bads getting anticlimactic ends (did it in a Legacy of Kain fic), since they puff themselves up so and it's liberating to the characters for them to not matter anymore. It's not a satisfying end to Van, but the issue is that he never satisfied the needs he manipulated them into investing in him, and so doesn't deserve a satisfying end. He deserves to be 'handled' in the way most advantageous to Asch, Luke, and their own needs and priorities.


	7. We

_And the epilogue(s). Thank you, and goodnight. _

_That means you, muses. Shoo._

-

Duke fon Fabre, as the Duke of Belkend and so on and so forth, really shouldn't love the princess of Kimlasca-Lanvaldear he had married in an alliance that they'd said would end up with his son on the throne and then he'd been told would end up with that son sacrificed at Akzeriuth.

Suzanne had always been sickly, and they'd had to try for a very long time to have the son the Score had promised them, had promised her, and by the end of it, as much as he'd loved her, he'd wanted to call the whole thing off. Except that she wanted a baby of her own, and if he had one by a mistress to carry on his own family line then it wouldn't be her son, and this was supposed to be about politics, not love.

The Score had promised that she would survive, but it had been an uphill battle, it had easily shortened her life by a decade, and then their one child was not going to be able to carry on the fon Fabre family line, he'd been cheated, she'd been cheated, and while he couldn't divorce her since she'd given him a son it was his duty to Belkend to either try to get her pregnant again, with the daughter she wanted, in essence _killing her so he could remarry_, or find a mistress to have that daughter and a son for the duchy and give them to Suzanne to raise.

Only that would have involved Suzanne finding out that she couldn't have other children, that her son was doomed to die, the son she had gone through months of hell for, and that was unacceptable. Not that anything about this _was_ acceptable, but it was the Score.

And now the Score was gone, Suzanne seemed to have gotten that daughter, said daughter's real father was one of his sins come back to haunt him, and since Natalia was adopted his son Asch was the rightful monarch of Kimlasca by blood.

Not that, family duty or no, politics or no, he wanted it, and frankly he couldn't blame him.

Suzanne was more energetic than she'd been since the kidnapping, talking about the wedding and grandchildren, and entirely focused on the golden lining. It really did seem like the past several years had been one entirely chaotic nightmare that the world had woken up from, and he had come out of it with two _living_ children and another heir for the fon Fabre family on the way.

And the geopolitical implications of having those children be the Light of the Sacred Flame and the Scion of Lorelei, although he was trying not to listen to that little voice.

Asch was speaking to him, was actually willing to come home, at least until after the wedding, and...

If he looked at the practical level all this was wonderful. If he thought about the fact that his son was marrying his daughter it reminded him of the insanity, and then he had to remember that said daughter was the Scion of Lorelei and therefore the rightful ruler of the Order of Lorelei, due to being a replica with Lorelei's fonon signature and therefore an avatar of the sentience and...

He really did envy Suzanne the ability to live in her own little world where the only things that mattered was that her babies were alive, and happy, and life was going on.

As it was, it was hard not to think that the room they'd put Luke in because it was isolated and easy to guard was now her and Asch's room because it was isolated and provided privacy for...

It was probably embarrassing enough for normal parents to find their children 'necking' as it was apparently called, but seeing two faces, identical and essentially daring him to comment had required a rapid retreat. He'd raised them both intending for them to die, and his presence in thier lives was entirely conditional on him remembering that having done that he had no right to tell them how to live anymore than he'd had to tell them how to die.

And if it was bad for him...

The citizenry were generally happy that their beloved Princess Natalia had gotten out of the insanity and was going to settle down with that sweet young nobleman with the handsome face, gallant manner, and tragic past.

Asch had been a god-general, however, one of those who had intended to kill them all, and Luke was not only a replica but was _Lorelei_. They had saved the world, and so on, but for everyone but him it seemed the fact they were siblings under the laws regarding replicas Princess Natalia had passed was lost in the general strangeness.

They were living legends, after all, almost gods, or literally so in Luke's case, and not human. Why judge them by human standards?

For him, they were human, and fallible, and the ones he had failed. He'd watched them struggle to learn how to walk, and now they were making Auldrant move with their powers.

He'd wanted Luke to treat Natalia that way, find happiness with her the way he'd found it with Suzanne despite everything. The halting courtesy Asch displayed, the mix of signals between former somewhat-opponent (Belkend had never been tamed by Baticul), knight to his lady, comrade in arms, lover, beloved...

They were happy, and Asch was learning to be human again, and Luke perhaps to be human, since she really hadn't been well taught.

He did his best to escape the gossip, but while these were his children they also... weren't. Were something outside his experience, outside his comprehension, outside the world's. This was no longer Asch's home and had never been Luke's, they'd either never fit into the world or had been spirited away from it by Van.

It seemed on many levels as though they would vanish, too strange and sacred, luminous and solemn to be real. His lost son, the scion of Lorelei he had sheltered unknowingly (he'd never known her, the change on the outside actually made realizing that and learning to understand her easier), the new life they were going to bring into a new world without the Score. The bed of ashes from which shone the light of the sacred flame, the light of Auldrant's hope.

They couldn't look away, but they couldn't touch either.

So Suzanne talked about how they could do anything they wanted for the wedding, it was Luke's cathedral after all, and they kept the curtains drawn because the fon belt was certain to be especially bright tonight and they all knew what that meant.

It was sacred, holy, beautiful, but it was also his children having sex, and he just really didn't want to think about that aspect.

So he focused on Suzanne, and her smile and the wedding nonsense that she found so fascinating. After all the excitement being bored to tears was something to be thankful for.

-

_When I was your age._

She hated those words.

When Mother was her age she'd been running her own religion for three years. When Father was her age he'd gotten himself kidnapped by That Bastard Van. That was the plus side of it: even when she'd destroyed the wall of the hunting lodge practicing Mother had just been, "At least it wasn't a city." The downside was that Mother had an unrealistic idea of how much responsibility, workload, and fighting skill an almost-ten year old should have.

Luke admitted that her childhood had been messed up and that seven year olds shouldn't spend all day fighting and then be given a shopping list to take care of while everyone else rested in theory, but in practice? And Auldrant was able to live up to Mother's unrealistic expectations enough that it was hard to admit when she couldn't.

It felt like she was letting Mother down, and Mother feeling terribly guilty and worrying that she'd been forcing Auldrant the way Mother had been forced instead of inspiring her meant Mother had to be reassured and when Mother wasn't happy Father and Lorelei got dragged in through the link to calm Mother down.

Mother wasn't forcing her to try to get stronger, well, yes, she was, but that was necessary training for someone who wasn't an aspect of Lorelei with Lorelei's power like Father had and very reasonable.

Mother was her inspiration, and the fact that Mother was saying "When I was your age I had to kill people," and "When I was your age they expected impossible things of me and I don't want to do that to you" hurt because it made it seem as though Mother didn't want Auldrant to be like her, and Auldrant wanted to be like her.

Which is why she was training with Mary and Badaq when they were supposed to be having a picnic. Which they were, in between Mary shooting at Auldrant while Auldrant and Badaq went Sigmund vs. Albert style on each other. It was fair since Auldrant had Lorelei helping out, with healing and since Lorelei was up in the fon belt he could help with warnings, even though he wasn't looking at their thoughts to see what they were planning since that was cheating.

It was also cheating to have Lorelei give her translations and test answers, even if she was named after the planet and Lorelei, whose name meant murmuring rock, was the planet's memory. It was, according to Father, a nice try, however. Mother had been all, 'you're never going to learn that way' about it, but Father understood being sneaky.

"_You are yourself, my perfect isofon, not any other, just as your mother, fragment of our soul or not, is herself_."

Normally that didn't happen, stuff leaking along the link between them, but she'd been talking to Lorelei and was probably obsessing a bit. "_It's just that I want to be like her, and that means being a hero as myself, not just because I'm like her or you. The way she saved you and proved she wasn't Father. And I can't think of anything I can do the three of you haven't done first and better. I mean, I guess I could marry Badaq and be Queen, since Father never actually ended up King, but that was what Luke fon Fabre was supposed to do in the first place._" Unite Baticul and Belkend for real, not to mention restore the genetic royal line to the throne.

"_Does that matter?"_

"_It does to me."_ That was what made the older three stop worrying, that line. That she wasn't doing it to prove herself (she had a self: she shouldn't think she needed to prove it to anyone unless they'd messed up somehow) or because she had to or anything. That she was doing it because she wanted to. "_But you're right, I shouldn't do something just because I'm supposed to and I really shouldn't decide to not to something I want to do just because someone... never really was supposed to, huh. They just told everyone he was._" Making Father think he had a duty to be king when his duty was to die.

...and wasn't _that_ calculated to make Lorelei guilt trip. Father and Mother were really great and Uncle Lorelei was nice too, but they were all pretty messed up, as Aunt Anise put it. They were getting better about it, but they were so paranoid about messing her up that she had to waste a lot of time telling them that she was fine, _really_, and didn't need fixing, unlike the rest of them.

When Father was her age, when Mother was a little kid (Auldrant considered under 8 a little kid as a big kid of almost ten), it sucked to be them.

It very much did not suck to be Auldrant. She had lots of cool toys, and they traveled all over the world and saw cool stuff, and she got to annihilate things, and cool artes, and Uncle Guy was teaching her how to fly Albiores, and she hated hearing about her parents suffering and not being able to do anything about it, since Van had gotten annihilated by hyperresonance when they were freeing Lorelei and so his fonons couldn't get dragged out of the fon belt and stabbed a lot more for good measure.

But if they didn't stop worrying about her then one of these days she was going to get fed up and run away to join Noir's Circus.


End file.
